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Philosophy and Human Values

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Philosophy and Human Values (1990) By Rick Roderick

http://rickroderick.org/

Socrates and the Life of Inquiry (1990)


Transcript: A course in philosophy and human values may seem paradoxical because philosophy
was that discipline, in our traditions – that’s western traditions, western civilisation – that began
with a search for unconditioned knowledge. Unconditioned by human knowledge, of things that
transcend this world or any other. That tradition is very much alive in philosophy today, mostly in
formal logic and mathematics, where it seems in place, and professional philosophers have a
name for that tradition. It’s the “analytic” tradition in philosophy. A course in philosophy and
human values has very little to gain from that tradition. And the reason for that, I think, is quite
simple. It’s because philosophy and its interaction with societies, cultures, and in its historical
context is very difficult to quantify. It’s very difficult to turn into a logical formula. And as a
matter of fact no-one – I think, and I have met a lot of philosophers, since that’s what I do for a
living – has ever demonstrated that a deductive argument, a logical argument, one that’s purely
formal, has ever solved a single philosophical problem. Except internally; the ones they made
themselves. It’s kind of like housekeeping, where you spill the stuff, and then you clean it up,
and then you spill it again… and a lot of analytic philosophy is like that.
What I’d like to try today is to do something a little different. And that’s to place philosophy in a
historical context, and then go through that and follow the mutation of problems, centered on
what it means to be human. A question that, for me… will begin with a kind of skeptical attitude.
In other words, we won’t begin as though we know what human nature is. A common, and I think
absolutely insidious, kind of, fallacy promulgated – especially in a society like ours, that’s
capitalist and so on – where subjects need to be of a certain kind in order to function in the state,
and in the economy. So it’s important in a society like that to have a rigid definition of what
“human being” is, for a whole host of reasons that I hope will become apparent. But I would like
to begin with it as a kind of skeptical questioning. And so, I’ll come to my first topic.
A book standardly used in introductory philosophy courses, and one that I will refer to only
briefly today is “The Trial and Death of Socrates“, by a little known author named Plato. So if
there are any members of the audience, or that are watching this that are worried about: “Is this
going to be a talk, sort of… off of the standard texts?”, you know, “Some talk about, ah… the
lesbian phallus in romantic novels”, don’t worry about it. We are going to be talking about Plato.
So you know, you can relax, chill out, it’s not going to be… it’s not going to be a problem.
Socrates inaugurates the western philosophical tradition in a very interesting way. And one of the
ways he does it is by separating philosophical discourse, in a kind of a way, from scientific
discourse. We can think of the earliest Greek
philosophers: Thales, Anaximander and Anaxagoras and others, who studied the cosmos. And I
think you are familiar with the word cosmos from other famous television shows. I mean, you’ve
heard Carl Sagan: “Cosmos…”. You know, and that’s kind of the way you need to say it for the
Greeks too because we get other English words from “cosmos”, for example: “cosmetic”.
Where, for the Greeks, the cosmos was sort of cosmetic; it appeared, and that was enough. And
it appeared to be harmonious and beautiful and orderly. That made it an object of study. If it had
appeared chaotic to them, it wouldn’t have been an object of study. It was its order that made it
possible to study it. And we know from – at least we think we know – from the texts, that when
Socrates was young he studied in this tradition and was interested in the cosmos, in what things
were made of. And the Greeks had rather simple answers. Things were made of fire, some
thought of water, some thought of earth, fire, water and air, and various other accounts. And for
a rather long time in western civilisation the account that there were four elements: earth, fire,
water, and air was the dominant scientific account for a long time.
In any case, Socrates began in this tradition, but he inaugurates philosophy in the spirit in which I
hope that I am going to talk about it for the next few hours. By changing the focus away from the
investigation into the movements of stars and the composition of the earth, and directs the
investigation of philosophy towards human beings. And this should be well known. I mean, it’s
an ordinary thing to know about Socrates. “Know thyself”, for Socrates, was the beginning of
wisdom, and Socrates – for him – this was more than a mere motto.
All the Socratic dialogues are in a sense… it’s important to understand first that they are
dialogues. They are written in dialogic form. In Greek society – and this will be my first amature
sociological remark – in Greek society, knowledge comes to be in a public place, where reasoned
arguments have to take place in the open; in a public forum. That’s to be greatly contrasted –
just by point of contrast – with a society like ours, where most of the important arguments that
shape our destiny are secret. In Greek society, that’s unthinkable because a polis is a place where
the only force that a free person is supposed to recognise, is that peculiar unforced force of the
better argument. That’s what differentiates you from a slave. You don’t argue with slaves in
Greek society, they obey, and you tell them. But when it’s a discussion among free citizens, they
can’t recognise your force as part of the argument. It has to be that strange unforced force that
happens, when someone just convinces you with an argument that you… “Oh wow, I think that’s
better than my argument. I think you’re right”.
So, the dialogues are built on that form of political life. Where dialogue is essential to knowledge.
Later in the course when we discuss the rise of modern society, we will get a peculiar new way of
human beings understanding themselves. A way that I will attach the name Descartes to right
now. A way where you sort of introspect and figure things out. Sort of a forerunner to Shirley
Maclaine, except more sophisticated [crowd laughter]. You kind of introspect and sort of talk to
your own inner self. Well for the Greeks, this was no way to achieve knowledge. It was through
talking with other people, and I don’t want to make this sound sort of too – I don’t know – “prep
schooly“, because if you read the dialogues, Socrates is flirting with both the men and the women
that he talks to. He mostly talks to men, this is western tradition, right? The women, I guess are
doing the housework and showing up, you know, in the jail cell when he’s about to die and stuff,
and whining or whatever… however these guys wrote it. You know, it’s why I am a little dubious
about some of the text. In any case.
The two important points that I hope that I have sort of moved around: One, Socrates turns the
investigation of philosophy towards human concerns, and away from the cosmos. And that
already begins a fateful distinction that will later be discussed in – I guess the book was in the
40’s or whatever – C. P. Snow‘s book “The Two Cultures“, okay. The culture of science, and the
culture of the humanities. That split has its origin in a way in Socrates turning his attention away
from, sort of, one of the cultures; the culture that was going to investigate nature and human
beings as though they were simply in it somewhere, and the culture that investigates human
beings who are human. In other words, as human, as opposed to as one species among others or
whatever.
So that’s… and that makes knowing yourself a crucially important part of knowledge. Now I’ll
make this as simple as I can. I love to use references to movies. You know, I mean not many of us
read any more, but a lot of us go to movies. In Superman ONE okay – let’s get down to a real
case, okay – in Superman 1, little baby superman is flying from the very sophisticated planet to
earth, and there are all these knowledge crystals. And I didn’t like the series that much okay, so
don’t frown at me. You know, it’s not that great a movie, I am just illustrating here. These
knowledge crystals tell him all the known physics of this advanced civilisation, but the last and
most precious crystal that he gets in the ship is symbolically important. Because now that you
know all this – you know, all these things – you may want to know what is most important.
And that’s who you are. And so the last crystal is supposed to give him the Socratic style of
knowledge.
So Socrates believed… I mean this is a nice illustration, because Socrates believed that one could
have ALL the other kinds of knowledge, and be totally lost – totally aimless – if one didn’t
have the other kind of knowledge, which was knowledge of one’s self. And this is nice to
remember today, I think. It’s a cautionary tale, because we live today in a society saturated with
information. Just… information… which I would want to radically distinguish from wisdom or
knowledge… but just saturated with information. But I think in our society, the Socratic question
is not only difficult to answer, but even a sense for its importance is being lost. We are just
saturated with information. We are told so frequently who we are, given a certain set of roles that
are pre-arranged, pre-established, and within which in a free society one is able to vary slightly.
In other words, to give you an example: we all know what a yuppie is, but we know that within
that category that there is some variation possible. You could be sandy haired or red haired. You
could wear black Reeboks or white ones. I mean, you know, there is a little… But this is… I am
trying to give you a sense for the strange distance between – historical distance – between the
Socratic search for wisdom, and this kind of way of finding out who you are. It’s very different.
It’s a very different thing.
Okay, well, let’s see. Should I finally throw in an argument? No, not yet. Socrates… in the
dialogues, his primary antagonists are called the Sophists. And the best historical analogy for the
Sophists… and I don’t like to use the word like most philosophers do – as a pejorative – because
the word “Sophist”… ah, they were simply folks who went around and they taught things. They
taught how to do well in the market place: “business school”. They taught how to win your cases
in the law court: “law school”. You know. They taught how to run the state well: “public policy” at
Duke, or wherever. So, you know… I mean, they went around and they got paid for doing this. In
fact, it’s interesting that at the trial of Socrates his one defence that’s really convincing that he’s
not a Sophist, is that he doesn’t get paid to teach. Of course, under that rubric, in our society we
are all Sophists, right? Everybody in front of every podium at university is a Sophist. Whether they
belong to the National Association of Scholars or not, they are still getting paid, and the
presumption by at least some Greeks was that if you got paid to say something, it was… to be
taken with a great deal of suspicion. So that was a defence of Socrates.
Well, the Sophists had a general view that backed it up that I think today, again, is a view that we
can understand in our own time. The Sophist position is stated variously by various Sophists. I
am not going to run through the various ones. In most of the dialogues, Socrates…
his interlocutor will be one of them. In most of the Socratic dialogues, he will be talking to one of
these people. But Protagoras was the best known Sophist, and his view has come down and has
become very famous, and it is that “man is the measure of all things”. Now, that is an ambiguous
statement. It’s one that Socrates wanted to point out the ambiguity in.
“Man is the measure of all things” can be read – in a modern era that sounds like – “individuals”.
A constructed historical category by the way. “Individuals” are the locus of knowledge. You have
heard that argument, I am sure, in regard to art. For example, someone will say: “Well, you
know… I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like”, and that’s a knockdown argument in art,
a lot of us think. You know. I happen to like Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. You know. It’s weird, I like it,
but… And that’s supposed to be a knockdown argument.
On this argument by the Sophists though, knowledge is impossible. Because each individual will
have – just like a nose – an opinion, and a right to it, and no-ones’ will be more right than the
other. That’s one way to understand his position. Another, more sophisticated way to understand
Protagoras is for him to be saying something like this: “Each tribe or cultures’ standards of
knowledge will be the standards that will hold for that tribe or that culture”. That’s a more
sophisticated version of what some philosophers like to call relativism.
Now Socrates is a very peculiar person – and I’ll connect this back up with human values in a
minute – because Socrates won’t accept either version of the relativist argument. And in our
context, one would think that would make him a dogmatist. I mean, because we are all, I think,
immersed in a culture of what I might call sophomoric relativism. By that I mean, we go: “Well,
that’s my opinion, damnit!”. You know, sort of, like interviewing someone for USA Today: “Well,
that’s what I think, damn it!”, “Let a nuke over Baghdad, damn it!” [crowd laughter]. You know.
And… Old Henry goes, “Well, that’s Old Bill’s opinion, y’know… I respect that”. And in a
democracy, we are supposed to be democratic about knowledge, you know. Right? Well,
everybody’s got a right to be a damn fool. And I am not opposed to that necessarily. I just want
to point out that that doesn’t end debate, right. I mean, you can still argue with Old Henry, or
Old Harry, or Old Sam… You can tell I have been in North Carolina for too long from these names
[crowd laughter].
Anyway… Socrates’ position was that the relativists had to be wrong, but it didn’t follow from
that that Socrates himself had to know the absolute truth. In other words, Socrates thought that
he absolutely knew there must be some truths that were absolutely important for human beings,
without making the further claim that he knew what they were. See, the further claim is what I
like to call the Jerry Falwell claim: “I am not a relativist, there are absolute truths, and by God, I
know them”. Where the “by God” is more than a mere, you know, conjoining there. I mean it’s
really: “by God I know them”. Well, Socrates held a position that was neither one of these: “There
must be absolute truths, but I myself don’t possess them”.
Now, that gives the explanation. And I am sure all of you have read a Socratic dialogue at one
time or another. Most people have been forced to at one time or another, right? Kind of peculiar,
but most people have been forced to read one. And, it’s irritating to read this old man’s
questioning. We need to remember Socrates was very ugly, according to the busts, you know, of
his face. Kind of like me: sort of short, fat, ugly, irritating person [crowd laughter]. And as
Nietzsche said, “To be ugly in Greece was already an objection” [crowd laughter]. You know. And,
I mean, I guess that’s where the modern word for Greeks comes from, on university campuses,
right? Because the show up ugly is already… you know… you’re out. So to be ugly in Greece was
already an objection. Socrates was a fat, ugly, little guy.
As I say, he engaged in this practice of questioning, and it’s irritating to read them, because you
go, “Oh, well, those are just… those questions just run in circles”. Have you ever got that feeling,
when you were reading them? “It’s just silly”, you know, “that’s not getting anywhere”. It’s a kind
of an American response, you know. “Well, what’s he getting at?”, you know, “and when is he
going to get around to it?”. Well, the Socratic procedure in the dialogues may not be to get
around to anything. Just the pure charm and beauty of the talk may itself contain a glimmer of
truth or transcendence. It’s not necessary in all the dialogues that he get to something. I mean,
the power of thought, just for its own autonomy, and its own beauty, might be something the
Greeks were interested in, and conversation, for its own sake. We are a little too busy now for
that kind of thing. But just for its own sake, it might be interesting.
So, Socrates held this position – as I say, a middle ground position – which is that there must be
absolute truths, but he didn’t know them. Why that’s important, is that gives a reason for the
dialogues. When Socrates questions people about beauty, honour, justice, truth – I finally
mentioned the big words philosophy is after, right, you know. When he talks about them… and
they all sound like pompous words today. I just feel crazy, you know, discussing philosophy
today. Because, in a society, sort of, where – as one modern philosopher put it – cynical reason
prevails, the very use of these words is bound to just sound like advertising slogans.
That’s the objective context within which people who try to teach what I teach have to fight a
kind of historical battle. Because, I mean, how in the hell can I compete with… well… I am on
television right now, “hello”… ah, no. How can I compete a huge media and advertising industry
that uses these same words that used to code the most important things about human beings, as
the characteristics of products, which you can get in a mediated way by consuming them. See,
it’s just so difficult then to re-establish, sort of, their meaning.
But for Socrates it was crucially important to try to get at the meanings of these words: truth,
beauty, goodness, courage, justice, and so on. And it was important not only for its own sake,
but for what it would tell him about himself and about his fellow citizens. So, it was a profoundly
civic act. Thus, when Socrates was found guilty at his trial, he suggested that the state should not
execute him, or even send him to exile, but rather should put him up as a public figure to be
supported by the state forever, for the service he performed for it. Okay? Which at a Greek trial
was not a good counter-sentence [crowd laughter]. That was liable to irritate the Jury, right. You
know, it could really tick off the Jury. It didn’t seem to hurt in the Olly North affair, but you know,
Socrates probably didn’t have that good a speech coach or whatever.
In any case, let me give the argument that Socrates gives against relativism. Because it’s one of
our little philosophical tricks we learn from him, and may itself be a piece of Sophistry. But,
against people like Protagoras, Socrates would argue as follows, and this is probably familiar to
at least some of you. He would take the proposition – “the truth”, for example being one
important concept – “the truth is relative”. About which he would ask Protagoras: “Is the sentence
you just uttered – ‘the truth is relative’ – itself a relative truth, or an absolute one?”. Well, if
Protagoras or some other Sophist responds that its an absolute one, then there is such a thing as
absolute truth, and they’ve discovered at least one of them: that the truth is relative. On the
other hand, if the truth is relative, then if you hold Socrates’ view that there is such a thing as
absolute truth, you are absolutely right too. You see how the dilemma works? Either way the
relativist responds, a space is opened up in which it’s possible to search for truths that transcend
the here and now. Because… even if there is one absolute truth – that there aren’t any – so then
you might begin to say, “Well, there might be others. You figured out one, maybe I could too”. On
the other hand, if you respond the other way, then at least a view like Socrates’ is still absolutely
right, because everybody is absolutely right. Of course Socrates is too. So this famous, sort of,
self-referential problem continues to this day to be a sort of thorn in the side of what I would call
“Sophomoric Relativism”. It really is a problem, for that position.
Okay, back again now to the human meaning of the Socratic project. And now I am going to do
just a little biography, which is not really… well, biography of this kind is supposed to have some
kind of philosophic import. Not only was Socrates ugly and sort of a pain in the behind, but the
people that he questioned on the various topics in order to find out more about himself – and
about his fellow citizens – were experts. And this is another point where I will like to contrast us
with modern society. It’s really hard to imagine a citizen publicly confronting Dan Quayle, and
being allowed to go on for thirty minutes on the… well since Quayle reads “The Republic”, he
reads Plato, so he ought to be able to do this, right? What is it? He tries to read Plato, that’s I
guess… that’s different. But anyway, to get a Socratic parallel, you would need to imagine
another free citizen encountering him, and going: “What is statesmanship?”. See, all the Socratic
dialogues are sort of – the Socratic ones, Plato writes other, later dialogues – the Socratic
dialogues are all of the form: “What is X?”, where the X in question will be one of these important
words to human beings. So you go, “What is statecraft, or politics?”, and he will go to someone
who is understood to be an expert by the society – I mean they will be – in that. If its courage,
he’ll go to a General, and ask: “What is courage?”.
Now, I think how Socrates got in trouble – other than being ugly and irritating – was that as he
questioned these people, it became apparent that they didn’t have the faintest idea of what the
hell they were doing. Which is a feeling I get every time I walk into a mall. I look at people and I
would like to just say something like: “What are you doing?”, and you know, after you get the
word “shopping”, what the hell do you suppose they’d say? “Well, it’s Saturday, and everybody’s
gotta be somewhere…” [crowd laughter], and you know… I mean, Socrates would, like, nail you
and keep going with that “What are you doing?” question. Where “What are you doing?” carried
the connotations of more than just right now, but, “What are you doing with your life?”, “What is
it about?”, “Does it have a theme?”, “Is there anything important going on?”. Which is an even
more important question today, when the planet is full of more people, right?, than have lived in
the whole previous history of the world. We need an answer to that, just to justify taking up the
amount of air we do. There are so many people on the globe, we are in somebody’s way right
now. So, it’s good to have an answer to the question of “What the hell are you doing?”.
So, philosophy… I’d like to start this course with the banal question that we should at least try to
develop some answer on our own life to a question as simple as “What the hell am I doing?”. And,
you would be surprised. I mean some of you go: “Well, I know what I’m doing”. Well Socrates’
presumption was that if you thought about it long enough, you wouldn’t be so sure. You
wouldn’t be so sure about it. In any case, I was talking about how he got in trouble… and trying
to get into a little trouble too, maybe.
Socrates would confront a General, a Statesman, a Poet, you know, a great Artist: “What’s great
art?” Well, we know the kind of answers you get there, if you ever read the interviews with William
Faulkner. Aren’t we all glad that he wrote… that he didn’t know what he was doing? Because if he
was doing what he said in his interviews he was doing, the books would have been just… eckkkk.
But, because he didn’t know what he was doing, we were lucky, the books were great. Thank God
they are not as stupid as what he said about them [crowd laughter]. See? And Socrates would ask
a poet: “What are you doing?”, and the poet would say some completely off-the-wall stuff. And
thank goodness they expressed themselves as poets and not… didn’t have to explain
themselves. But the Socratic drive was to get people to explain themselves.
Now, a social thing had happened in Greece that was unfortunate for Socrates was that the young
would gather around to listen to these conversations. And, you can imagine a scene something
like this. With some young people gathered around Dan Quayle – forced not to leave, and nobody
to pull him away – in a thirty minute discussion with (at least) a clever person like Socrates, about
Statecraft. One can imagine a sort of, 15 or 16 year old today raised on Public Enemy and MTV,
the kind of hilarity that might arise, and the irritation that Quayle might feel, trapped in such a
situation. He would consider it “trapped”, but for the Greeks, it would be of the essence of being
a free person to be in a situation of dialogue like that. In any case, that’s another difference.
In any case… this got him into a lot of trouble, and was another factor that led up to the rather
dramatic title of this book – which is really a collection of the various dialogues – about “The Trial
and Death of Socrates”, which led up to his trial and subsequently being sentenced to death. So
philosophy has, in terms of human values, I think, a rather noble beginning. It begins on a quest
for meanings that transcend the here and now. These, for me, are not necessarily universal, and
certainly have more to say about local conditions than universal ones. I do think we can make
historical comparisons, I have been doing that pretty routinely up here. But he thought that these
questions had something profoundly important to tell us about what human beings… were.
Now, one further point that I want to make about Socrates and about the Greek way of life, as it
will be presented throughout here. And this is by way of sort of distancing myself from a rather
standard presentation of Socrates. We now know, that what are called “the Greeks”, and what I
have been referring to as “The Greeks”. We know that from the scholarship of African Americans
and others, that this was largely – and my whole lecture has been based on this text, and I don’t
mind evoking these Greek values, because I think they are still very important, but you should
have this note of suspicion – and that’s that largely it was 19th century German scholarship that
as it were, invented the Greeks for us. I mean, at one time, they were just, you know, like in the
16th century, they were one among other earlier civilisations, you know.
The 19th century Germans, I don’t know if you know this, were extremely impressed with the
Greeks. It’s kind of obvious if one looks at their art or reads their literature, right? They were very
impressed with the Greeks, and what they found out about them. In any case, the Greeks as
understood today, through that tradition is the only possible topic that I could bring up here.
Because in a certain sense – and this is not a relativist argument – the past is only accessible
through readings and reinterpretations of the past, in the absence of a time machine. I mean, I
think that’s at the basis of our wonderful time machine fantasy about history. Is all of us would
kind of like to know what it was really like. You know. What was it really like.
The trouble with the past is it’s kind of like the present. We don’t know. I mean, we don’t know
what it was really like. And our further worry is that even if we had been there, the odds that
people who have been socialised to speak an informational language, not to seek these things
that are advertising slogans to us. It’s very doubtful we would understand what the hell was
going on if we were there. It might sound as peculiar as it does to my students to be forced to
read these things… I mean, “What the devil is that? All this time talking about beauty? About
goodness? I mean, good grief”.
I would like to now make a historical point about something that philosophers today are more
aware of than they used to be, and which is important. Not all kinds of inquiry can appear in just
any setting. There are conditions for the possibility of certain questions being asked. And in the
case of Greek society, they went along with a relatively unproblematic discourse for quite a while,
especially during the very high days of their empire, when their empire was in a really secure
position. In that social setting, and under those social conditions, there was no Socrates, and no
condition for the possibility of there being one. And here is why. Because in the sort of classic
Greek language, the one that comes out of, you know, the oral tradition of Homer and others, it
would be insane to ask something like “What is courage?”, because the response – which many of
you may have had in the back your mind as I was speaking – would be: “Don’t you have a
dictionary?”. In other words, we all know what it means. We have got a cohesive society. We are
unified, it’s like about the war now, we’re all together on this. We know what courage is. So there
would have been no space for the Socratic inquiry.
It was only after a rather unpleasant experience in a war. Greek war, someone may know about it.
Kind of a famous war. Good journalists back then too: Thucydides, fairly decent journalist. Could
have got a job with “The Post”, probably [crowd laughter]. Ah, but after a tragic experience with
the war, and a military dictatorship, the words that had become standard in their culture, and
had been used unproblematically with meanings attaching to definite positions, began to be
sources of irritation.
And so, the ground and the possibility for Socrates’ inquiry was not really his individual genius,
although that itself is a nice thing, and I am not against it. But it was not possible except against
a background of a society that had deeply begun to question what these words really meant. And
one can’t help but think – for example, to try to make this parallel come alive – that the radical
questioning that has been going on in the universities about the cannons of knowledge, the
instruments of knowledge, has not been profoundly affected – as Time magazine admits – but
no… it’s clear that the current, struggle over the cannon and the meaning of these classic texts,
all of which… I have selected only classic texts for this course. I am not going to read them
necessarily, or discuss them in necessarily a classic way. But the point of all this questioning is
that after this countries’ experience in the 50’s and the 60’s of both the civil rights movement
and anti war movement, counter culture, and so on, it became again a problem to say: “What
does it mean to be, for example, a good woman?”. Well, there was something, sort of, in 1951
that that meant that clearly is a matter of debate now. Okay. Is that clear, is that a good
example? It’s pretty clear.
Well, I’ll pick one that is a little more controversial. “What’s a patriot?” became a matter of debate.
In, sort of, 1954, it was not all that confusing. And I am old enough to remember people not
being confused by it. I think people want it to not be non confusing again, desperately. They may
want it more than they want even money, which is amazing. But the point is that philosophy –
philosophical inquiry, of the dangerous kind, as opposed to of the analytic, boring, academic
kind – philosophic inquiry of the dangerous kind catches a society at a moment when it’s
insecure about what the main terms that hold it together mean. Like man, woman, patriot, and in
particular: “human being”. So that is the human edge of philosophy. It’s that you catch society at
a moment of danger when a term or a set of terms that are very important to the identity of a lot
of people are in question. Or possible. That the questioning of it is at least possible. It may be
that we are today.
And since I am trying to remind myself as I talk about eternal values – and not being a relativist –
and I do think its important to search for values that transcend the here and now. On the other
hand, in the time since Socrates, we have become more dubious about eternal ones. Me too. We
are all more dubious about those. But I would like to look for values that transcend the here and
now, and for obvious reasons. The obvious reason in my case being that I think the ones that
prevail here and now suck [crowd laughter]. Good English word… right? We all know what that
means.
By the way, it’s interesting to note – sidebar here, for you amature philosophers who want to read
more books of this kind – most of the texts are translated to get those kinds of words out of
them. But the language spoken by Socrates, as recorded by Plato, is a quite… is not a fancy
language just filled with technical terms, but is a pretty ordinary Greek. And it’s only later, sort
of, mid 20th century or early 20th century, when philosophy starts to develop a
“professionalised” vocabulary. See, in all its previous history it tried to communicate with at least
some class of people. It’s only recently that it tries to communicate with no-one [crowd
laughter]. I mean, the Journal of Philosophy. If twelve people go down on the same flight, there
won’t be any more Journal of Philosophy. Because its eleven guys writing to this other guy [crowd
laughter]. And that’s… so…
What I am trying to do today is to broaden out the interest of philosophy a little more than that,
to the extent that it means anything more than another niche in an intellectual marketplace
already filled up with so much garbage, you’d be lucky… it’s kind of like a big sale. You are lucky
to find the scarf you want ’cause it’s just filled with crappy scarves, and there’s one you might
want. And so, all I can do is to make philosophy and it’s kind of enquiry insofar as it’s critical,
insofar as it catches society at a moment of danger, insofar as it asks us who we are, and who
our fellow citizens are. I want to make that look important, like an attractive scarf in the pile. I’d
like to be able to give it more punch than that, but then I’m speaking in the here and now. In
quite a dark moment of the history of this country, in my opinion. One I would discuss at length,
and I will in the question period, and outside in the hall, and in public forums, to the extent that
it’s still allowed to do so.
In the first lecture, I wanted to just introduce you to some of the themes I’ll pursue throughout
the lectures. “What does it mean…” – and the grand theme, one that I certainly won’t answer as
these lectures progress is – “What does it mean to be a human being?”. I will try to localise the
question. Today I have tried to say what it was like – in a way – what was it like, how did the
Greeks understand a certain set of human practices. And I have said almost nothing about it,
except about the practice of Socrates. So, as we go through these lectures, I’m going to lay out
various – what I will call – ways of living. And the Socratic way is one of critical inquiry. And this
shouldn’t be understood in the way we understand inquiry today. As just sitting on your butt and
looking through a microscope. No. Inquiry in Socrates’ sense, critical inquiry, is to go around in a
kind of passionate search. For what’s really important. Where that itself is up for grabs. It’s not
like you know what that is for sure.
Socrates doesn’t just ask “What is truth, beauty and the good?”, he has one dialogue where he
asks: “What’s fine?”. And the best translation would, sort of, be the English “fine” in the sense of:
“Boy, you’re fine”, “Isn’t that finnee”. And, so that doesn’t sound like truth or beauty. The
dialogue is about “what’s fine?”. So, I mean, Socrates goes around looking for these things, in
order to get a fix on what is important about being human. What’s special about it. In order, also,
finally, to disprove the Delphic Oracle who when asked “Who was the wisest man in the world?”
said: “Socrates”. And this was reported to him, and he went: “This is nuts, can’t be true, I don’t
know anything”. And he finally figured out the riddle of the oracle. He was only the wisest man in
Greece, because he not only didn’t know anything, but he had a meta-belief about that.
He knew that he didn’t know anything. Very important distinction.
And as I make some of the rather dogmatic remarks that I am going to make through the lecture,
I should make my own position as a philosopher clear. I am not a relativist and I am not an
absolutist, in the sense in which I have discussed them today. I am a fallibilist. That means
something like this. A fallibilist is someone who passionately believes certain things. Passionately
believes certain things, some of them quite bizarre, as you’ll find out as we go along. But about
those beliefs, I believe that they could be wrong. A peculiarly modern attitude, but one that I find
myself forced to, through long, and bitter historical experience. Not only philosophical by the
way, but historical in a more bloody and mundane sense. It seems only wise policy both
philosophically, and politically to be able to hold a belief passionately, but to have a belief about
that belief that it could be wrong. Some of you may think that that’s absolutely paradoxical. That
if one must believe something passionately, then you have got to just believe it. And I hope that
turns out to be wrong, because it doesn’t seem to make me feel any more schizophrenic that the
rest of you [crowd laughter] to both know I hold a series of beliefs quite deeply, and yet to have a
belief about them at another order, that they could be wrong. I mean, I hope that that will work.
Anyway.
In any case, that’s not a bad characterisation of the position of fallibilism. And I am a fallibilist
about fallibilism. Let me go ahead and go a little further, which means that that whole stance
could be wrong. So, I am a fallibilist all the way down, see, because even that way of looking at
knowledge could be wrong, and so on. And to be philosophical is not to stop pursuing the
question when it becomes inconvenient. It is the opposite, in that sense. The kind of inquiry I
want to pursue is kind of the opposite of a televised news conference. Where everyone knows the
limits of questioning, and obeys without question like slaves and lackeys. Beneath the level of
humanity, of free human beings. Ought to make us ashamed. But philosophy doesn’t behave in
that way. Not at its best. It has been known to. In fact, like religion, it has frequently served the
powers that be. I am trying to pick out a certain group of philosophers that at their best, don’t do
that, okay. At their best they question radically. I want to distinguish that from say, a news
conference, where the spectrum of questions are quite simple and very, very prescribed. And,
moreover, the answers are already written. And we could supply them without waiting for the
parties to answer.
If you watch enough of this stuff, I mean, I’m… I have become a CNN junkie. So now, I can just
give the report before they give it. I can just say: “Well, what happened in the war today?” – “We
won!” [crowd laughter]. Short summary of the news: “Lots of them died, not many of us did. We
won”. You know. I mean, I heard that for seven years, earlier in my life: “There’s a light at the end
of the tunnel”. Well, whenever you see a light at the end of the tunnel, philosophy reminds you
that there is at least the dim possibility that the light at the end of the tunnel will turn out to be a
cave… a candle at the end of a cave. I mean, that doesn’t mean it is going to come out the other
side of anything worthwhile.
Okay, Socrates. Know thyself. Ask embarrassing questions. And yet, try to avoid his fate, which
is… don’t be tried, found guilty and executed, unless you are his age. So, I want to leave you with
a sort of a joke about philosophy for this first lecture. And that’s that it’s a very interesting
question whether Socrates would have escaped from prison – many of you know this story, I
didn’t want to repeat it, and waste my 45 minutes – it’s a very interesting question about whether
Socrates would have chosen to escape from prison, which was one of his choices, if he had been
a 25 year old inquirer, as opposed to a 71-72 year old inquirer. It would have been very
interesting. I think the choice would have been quite different. He might then have considered
some of his friends’ plans to escape. Certainly we know that Aristotle later did. He fled Athens
and said “I don’t want them to sin twice against philosophy”. And so that means that at some
point I’ll have to leave Duke, so they don’t sin twice against irritating West Texans, who are just
interested in reading philosophy books, although I wouldn’t say “just”.
And I do think that the analogy that I would like to leave your attention on is that this kind of
critical inquiry – if it can be carried out at all – can be carried out when societies are troubled. In
other words, when the meanings of words become topics for debate and redefinition. And that’s
not a matter of just debate, because the way we describe our lives and understand them is
intimately and inextricably connected to the way we live them. You describe yourself as an
insurance salesman – it’s okay, I’m not mad at any of you if you do that, but – if that’s all the
description that you’ve got, that’s going to structure a certain kind of life. That set of
descriptions, and those sets of beliefs. And I want to open up a possibility that there might be a
way, even under these conditions to expand such definitions. Maybe not eternal ones, but
localisable, and to be American in the last instance, usable ones.

Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics (1990)


Transcript: Well, in the last lecture I tried to just make a few suggestive remarks in order to get
us off the ground about what might be called “the Greek way of life”, and different forms of
human conduct of which only one I suggested and discussed, and that was the Socratic life of
enquiry. And I didn’t mean by that life of enquiry an inactive life, an apolitical life or one
unconcerned with the state or with other humans. But, in fact, I wanted to present it not as some
academic debate, but as a life deeply immersed in your social situation, and to understand who
you are and who your fellow citizens are.
Among the values that, Greek society held out as an answer – one possible localisable and
possibly usable answer of what human life was like for the Greeks was, to sum it up in one word
(and this is all I will have to say about Aristotle or Plato) – is “Excellence”. In a way, it’s well
known that the Greeks have an ideal of Excellence. Where by Excellence, the Greeks meant
something like this: to be an all rounder. You know, in sort of West Texas parlance, “an all
rounder”. Somebody that, you know, could write a country song, punch out a big guy, shoot a
game of pool, work a full days work, and was smart enough to read a thick book. And I don’t
mean to make it too mundane, because if you look at the description of Odysseus in Greek
literature, that was sort of an ideal of Excellence in their culture. And it’s not like our ideal,
because Odysseus was, one, a clever liar, two, was someone who would cheat the gods when
possible and necessary, who could drive a furrow, throw a discus, sail a boat, you know, and a
bunch of things, right.
And so for the Greeks, excellence was a whole series of traits of human beings, well rounded in
all respects. One of the great Greek tragedians was buried, and his marker remarked on what a
great soldier and orator he had been. It said nothing about him winning the prize for the plays
for which we know him today. So, the Greeks had this idea of excellence, which to us can only be
a pale shadow in a society where we mean something so radically different by excellence. By
excellent, we would have to mean – and perforce have to mean – an excellent lawyer, an excellent
politician, an excellent housewife. I’d rather say worker. An excellent houseworker. It’s hard
to say “worker” when they are unpaid labour, but, houseworker, and so on. So Excellence, in a
society in which labour is greatly divided can only be, as it were, a pale shadow of this Greek
ideal, okay. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be excellent at your job, and learn to ski. But the
Greeks meant a bit more by it than that.
So, what we will pursue now, in a discussion that unfortunately has to be far too brief, will be
ideals of Excellence in Roman society, and I am going to run through those. Some of them are
fairly well known to us today. So I am going to run through a few of those ideals of human
excellence. Again, localisable to the Roman Empire, again, very Western. You know, all
traditional, no problem there. And then I will end with a little intimation of something I will try to
pick up on again at the end of the lecture. Even though Christianity as a form of belief dominated
Western civilisation for so long, I am going to have very little to say about it in the early part of
the lectures, for a reason I’ll give you toward the end of this one.
Okay. So now, to move from the Greeks to the Romans. There are three different views I want to
discuss in terms of how to conduct ones life and two of them bear a nice historical parallel with
conditions in the Roman Empire and its fate. One of the positions with which many of you are
familiar – at least in name – because the word, although it means something slightly different
today, this position is probably familiar. One of the answers to “how to live?”, given during the
rise of the Roman Empire, when the markets were filled with goods, and there was much to
enjoy. Even for some of the Plebeians there was much to enjoy, because Rome was looting the
world. Maybe some of you understand this condition from your experience. I don’t know, but
anyway. It was a good time in philosophy: it was Hedonism.
Now, it’s important to understand that philosophers of the old school make a living refuting
Hedonism. Because how could a view about what is the best kind of life for humans, or the right
thing to do – and I’d like to make this simpler by just using Spike Lee‘s phrase – how could “do
the right thing” mean “do what makes you happy”. But actually, this view is harder to refute than
one might think. Because in answer to the problems of life, the Hedonist response that you
should do what makes you happy is actually a fairly powerful view, I think. Now, I think that it’s
more powerful under conditions where it’s possible to do that, for obvious reasons.
Now, the Hedonists back up their arguments with two kinds of claims, and we’ll return to this
again when we get a kind of modern form of social Hedonism in John Stuart Mill. But the
Hedonism of the Roman Empire was connected with various schools: the Epicureans, and others
(where we get the word Epicure). That ought to already tell you something about the kinds of
pleasures to be pursued. And this will be disappointing to many of you. The kinds of pleasures
the Epicureans wanted to pursue – and nearly every version of Hedonism makes this distinction –
were the “higher” pleasures. By which they meant the ones that don’t have the negative payback.
The higher pleasures are, as the word “epicure” indicates: excellent food in moderate quantity.
Like swordfish, steak, just right, blackened a little, yuppified just a little. A little picante sauce,
which has become quite popular. Tex-Mex variant. Just enough though to be healthy, good for
the heart. A little running. And these things in moderation. A little learning, but not too much.
Not enough to trouble the mind, but enough to satisfy it [crowd laughter]. On the other hand,
one wouldn’t indulge in those pleasures that have a strong negative side. I mean, this is the way
the philosophical position is. Myself, I have always wanted some Hedonist to just come out and
say “I am for the really gritty ugly pleasures, I like them” [crowd laughter], but that’s not a view…
I want to defend partially that view, but it’s not a view that is, you know, philosophically
respectable, although it may even be more plausible.
No, the lower pleasures are things like getting dog drunk, which provides a lot of pleasure, until
the next morning. Then you have got a lot of pain. Falling dumbly in love. Which provides a lot of
pleasure, and then gives a lot of pain. These were to be avoided because they led to a troubled
mind. So, those pleasures were, as it were… not… this was a very rational position, see. The idea
is to maximise ones pleasure, so you follow the most rational course to do that. You go after
“higher pleasures” that don’t have a bad down side, and avoid the so called “lower pleasures” that
have this down side. A good drunk…
Again, our culture is familiar with this: “just say no to drugs”. Well, the reason for that can’t be
that they don’t make you feel good. You know, I’m an old 60’s person, and I know better [crowd
laughter]. They make you feel good! But they have a downside. So, I am not arguing – don’t
charge the stage – I am not saying “say yes to drugs”. I am just saying you’d be a fool to say
“They don’t make you feel good”. They do make you feel good. You gotta be… you got to tell the
truth about things once in a while. It won’t hurt. Even in Reagan and Bush’s America it doesn’t
hurt to tell the truth once in a while. Just don’t get caught by your friends, okay [crowd laughter].
Ah, in any case, the problem with drugs though, is that they have this down side. You know, the
“Cocaine Blues” is a familiar, not only country song, but phenomena. Way up, way down. This
view of seeking pleasure was quite widespread in a period when Rome has a lot of pleasures to
seek, booty from all over the world.
During the decline of Rome, a rather different, view of the best kind of life for human beings
arose – and I’ll discuss it briefly too and then we’ll compare them, because the comparisons are
interesting – and that’s Stoicism. And just like Hedonism still means something like Hedonism to
us, when we call someone a Stoic today, it still means something like what they meant by it:
Stoic. Now, it’s important to see that there is a connection between these modes of beliefs, and
the social and historical conditions that people are actually responding to when they formed
these beliefs.
So, when less booty is available in Rome, and Caligula is wasting a lot of it anyway – and scaring
the hell out of you – one way to respond is the set of beliefs of Stoic fortitude. And the word…
that was important for them and that they chose to model their way of life on, is not like for the
Greeks’ Excellence, or for the Hedonists’ happiness. For the Stoics, the word was “Apatheia“.
Now, I am saying it in its Latinate form, rather than in English, because if I say it in English, it’s
“Apathy”, and you get the wrong idea. For the Stoics, Apatheia was something you cultivated.
Unlike our society where they cultivate it for us, but then, I mean, you know… Apathy was
something you cultivated, and it didn’t mean withdrawal, except in the sense of a courageous
stance against, as it were, the buffeting powers of fate over which you had no control, so the
best one could do was to “buck up”, and face a bad situation.
Now, many of the Stoics… and I am oversimplifying to get the arguments clear. Certainly
oversimplifying these two broad historical movements, but we have gotta make the positions
clear. Some of the Stoics thought – with the Hedonists – that happiness would be the best thing,
but they thought it was unattainable in this world. That’s a very important belief structure, given
the next belief structure that will be historically dominant in Western Civilisation. It’s a very
important switch in belief. It’s that now happiness is still considered to be something great if we
could get it, but if you can’t, the next best thing is to face up to it. You know, “buck up”. An
attitude with which I am still familiar, as I say, from my background in you know, sort of the
Texas attitude toward a drought: “Well you can’t be happy living out here…” – “But damn it, they
are not going to run me off this place” [crowd laughter]. Well, that’s kind of Stoic! There’s
nothing apathetic about it, I mean, the wind blew all the crops away, his farm has gone 80 miles
down the road, and you know, to be happy about it would be crazy. But you could face it with
some kind of courage, some kind of fortitude. So that was the Stoic ideal.
So, as I say, many of them believed that happiness would be good, but was not possible. So their
arguments for that are based on two things, one of which you may have already caught me on –
and I hope you have – is that for the Stoics, the distinction between higher and lower pleasures is
dubious. Is questionable. Where do you really draw the line with that one, and why? I mean, are
there any pleasures that don’t have a down side? And, for the Stoics, there aren’t. There are
none. Even, you know, enjoying Beethoven’s Fifth requires lots of work to get into a position to
enjoy it. You know, you don’t just walk in and go – well some people do, who like to bluff – they
go: “Ain’t that great…”. It’s the first time they ever heard classical music: “Yeah, I love it…”. No,
to really enjoy it, and to get pleasure from it, requires listening to a lot of things first. To really
enjoy Moby Dick is more than just seeing the excellent movie by John Huston, written by Ray
Bradbury. You have to actually read Moby Dick, and it’s long and there are sections in it about
rendering whales, and its… that goes on about 200 pages and you’ve gotta get through them,
they are important to the story. So that’s work, you know…
So, for the Stoics, there is not this simple distinction between higher and lower pleasures. All
pleasures have, as it were, a down side. All of them. And for people who try to lead a single
minded life of happiness or pleasure – to set that out as their goal – may fall victim to an old
Eastern Proverb from Eastern philosophy, and that’s that “Chasing happiness is like chasing your
own shadow”. It’s almost as if one could get still, one might be able to find it, but it you keep
chasing it, it’s always a little bit ahead. Well, the Stoics had some view like that about happiness.
If you chase it, it runs. So, the Stoic answer was to lead this courageous life of, you know, it
sounds a little corny, but it’s not any cornier than “Let’s buck up and take it” guys, sort of a male
kind of thing, you know, I have to admit. Definitely, well, it’s sexist, like most of this tradition. In
any case, that was the view, and it’s important to see when the two views were popular, and in
what ways. One view corresponded to a rising empire and its values. The other view was more
prevalent during the falling, or declining empire and with its values.
So, in modern parlance, one might expect in a society on the ascendency to have all kinds of
optimistic values. In that regard, let me quickly refer you to the commercials that were made in
the 1950’s. Especially those 1950’s commercials that projected what life would be like in the year
1990. We are there now and we look back at those commercials, and guess what. They missed it,
okay. It was wrong. They missed it. They missed it by a long way. You can even look at The
Jetsons and go: they even missed that. They missed it. The future didn’t turn out to be like they
imagined. Very optimistic account of the future.
In this current period… to try to again, drive my analogy home about how ways of thinking and
views of human conduct are rooted in real life problems, in real social and political problems. In
our current period, in what form do we imagine our futures? One of the most striking examples
to me here, are the new movies that I call “near future” movies. My favourite is Blade Runner.
Now, Blade Runner – I don’t know how many of you have seen it – is a magnificent film for this
simple reason. It is post-apocalyptic. Bored with the apocalypse. There’s not going to be a
nuclear war because the world is not that interesting. See, that’s already, sort of, more cynical
than many of us want to be. The world is not interesting enough for us to enjoy the sting of a
real death. Instead we’ll have this decline, and smudge into the life where our lives and the lives
of machines will become ever more blurred, as it is becoming.
So, in Blade Runner, we get just a near future projection that shows us what Los Angeles would
look like in thirty years if things just keep going on the way they do. You don’t need any
apocalypse to watch Blade Runner You just need to know it is going to get more polluted, more
people from more places are going to come there, and they are going to make more money, and
it’s going to look like that, and then you’ve got Blade Runner. So, those near futures help to say
something about how we see our future as a culture, as opposed, for example, to the culture of
the 50’s. Now, in my view, other cultural artefacts like the apocalypse movies, were really ways to
dodge the sticky and ugly task of facing a plausible near future. See, the easiest way to do this is
to have a big apocalypse and start all over, then you don’t have to face all the nasty questions
about what’s really going to happen if things just grind on. So, Blade Runner would be an
example I would use there to try to remind you that our culture too has different views, different
periods that code its rise, decline, and so on… and it’s not unusual. So, in the Roman case as
well, toward the declining period of Rome, Stoicism became a dominant view.
Now… there is a very positive thing to say about Stoicism. It has a deeply democratic side to
it. Egalitarian side, better, since the word democracy has become polluted through misuse and so
on. What word hasn’t, but it in particular. It has an egalitarian aspect to it. The two most famous
of the Stoic philosophers: one was a king, and one was a slave. And the beauty of that was as
follows: that they were brothers in suffering. Both would have to put up with outrageous… what,
you know, Shakespeare, Hamlet, calls: “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. A kings’
life is full of troubles. Shakespeare again says, you know: “Uneasy sets the crown upon the head”,
so the king needs to be a stoic, because he’s got troubles. And of course, the slave does too, and
this view has beneath it an egalitarian notion that we are alike in a couple of respects.
We are all going to have troubles, and then there is that absolutely democratic institution, that as
far as I know hasn’t been abolished yet, and its death. The one absolutely democratic institution
on the planet. I mean, isn’t that beautiful? In a way, rather than to be, sort of, existentialist about
it – that sort of dress in black, 60’s attitude about it – I mean death is a kind of utopian concept
for me because even the rulers have to face it. I mean, I actually laugh, and some of you must
too, when you see the poster: “He who dies with the most toys wins”. You know, well, you go:
“That’s kind of a relief, you know”. In the end, Trump just has three limousines at his funeral,
well at the rate Trump is going, he may only have one. But in any case, the point is that there is a
democratic institution widely respected by us and feared, even when we don’t want to think or
talk about it much. And beneath it, as I will argue later, there is a greater danger.
Okay, I talked about Hedonism, and I’ve talked about Stoicism. The important connection I want
to make is: it seems difficult to imagine how on the ruins of the Roman Empire, Christianity could
have arisen and conquered, and had its conditions conquered so quickly in the West. I mean, that
really is a rather remarkable historical, you know, turn of events. That a slave religion, banned
throughout the empire, would end up being adopted and then spread. Now we don’t want to be
too mystical about this, because the historian Gibbon said that it spread not by the preaching of
the word, but by fire and the sword. That is a way to spread certain doctrines. I read the paper
this morning. You can still spread a doctrine that way. Not simply through the preaching of the
word on TV, but the fire and the sword are sometimes handy. There is more than one way to
convince someone, in short. I am arguing that there are preferable ways to do it. But, in any case,
Stoicism helps us to understand this: during the declining part of the Roman Empire, the Stoics’
account of their social reality and of the limited chances for happiness within it… you know, this
courage, Apatheia, was also backed up with an almost – and here I am going to use the
Americanised version – existentialist view, that sort of “All is vanity”.
So for me, a classic Stoic doctrine you can all go back and read during break – it’s not an
assignment – it’s in every motel. It’s the Gideon bible. Open your Gideon bible, find the book of
Ecclesiastes, and read Ecclesiastes. It is a magnificent Stoic doctrine because it says “Vanity of
vanities, all is vanity”. Pretty big statement. ALL. The guy goes: “Look, I had money, but that was
vanity. I gave myself to know knowledge, that was vanity. All is vanity”. Well that interesting old
text helps to explain why the Stoics were ready to hear, finally, the message of the Christians,
which about the world, was the same. In other words, Saint Augustine’s account of this world,
and the Stoics’ account are the same. Augustine calls this world “the region of unlikeness”.
Everything is garbled up, messy, based on a text of Saint Paul’s, you know… “We see through a
glass darkly”, you know.
And so, I want you to see that Stoicism, as it were, prepared really fertile ground for the
preaching of the word of the early Christians. And the reason it did seems to me simple: because
the Stoics had a problem but not a good answer. Namely, they had a good account of the
problem, and then along come these weirdos who you have been previously hunting down and
killing, and they go: “Wait a minute, now listen to us again. We know when you had all your
power, this didn’t sound so smart, now you might want to listen”. And then the answer comes:
“But there is good news. Although there is a world like this one, there is another one…”. When we
discuss Freud, we will understand why humans sometimes make such projections. While this
world isn’t working out, there’s another one, and while justice won’t be rewarded here, it will be
rewarded there. While happiness isn’t possible here, the right kind of life will give it to you there.
So if you read Ecclesiastes all the way to the end, the reason Ecclesiastes is not finally a Stoic
doctrine, is because the preacher has the hope in his heart that the messiah will come, and there
will be an answer to these problems. But, with the Stoics, they both agree about the world that
we are all in now – the mundane world that we are in now – that it’s “a bad show”, not working.
So, that is the way in which these movements – and that’s a very brief account, but – that’s the
way in which these three answers to human conduct arose in succession, sort of. Not rapid
succession, these were massively long historical movements, many variants. And when I say
movements, you’ve got to remember that as long as I am discussing Greek society, Roman
society, and Medieval society, you have to point out that if you talk about movements among
people who think, you are only talking about a very limited number of folks. Not in terms of them
thinking, but in terms of us having any record of it. For all I know, they thought more and better
about all of this.
But, it seems to me that Marx has a banal truth down, and I know today it’s not popular to say
that Marx got anything right. But one thing, certainly I think Marx got right was that as far as the
history of ideas go, the ruling ideas in each epoch are basically the ideas of the ruling classes.
The dominant ones. Not all the ideas, but the dominant ideas of each historical period will be the
ideas discussed by the dominant classes. The reason that’s not a surprising thesis is that the
women are out having babies this fast, and that’s almost biologically required, as well as
required by patriarchy for a society to continue. It’s required by both. Doesn’t justify it, its…
barbaric. And then slaves are doing necessary labour, without which you do not have the leisure
to pursue philosophy.
It’s important to remember this is a leisure activity. Without leisure time, you can’t pursue it. It
may be why we don’t have a very philosophical culture now. It’s because we work longer and
harder now than we did forty years ago. I think that’s right statistically, although there must be a
sociologist somewhere in the crowd. But, it’s right according to the advertisements I have been
seeing on TV that, as it were, brag about it: “We now work 65 hours a week”, and I went: “Oh, joy!
That’s a real thrill. Glad it’s going up, hope you guys can get it back up to where it was
when Dickens wrote. Congratulations”.
I am sorry, I am off on a squee. Now I’ll have to come back to the point. I just… my mind
wanders, I don’t know… watching too many Robin Williams skits [crowd laughter]. Anyway. Ah,
these three forms of human conduct. The last, and that is that the slow ascendency of
Christianity. Spread by both the preaching of the word, and fire and the sword. Based on a
mystery, wrapped in an enigma and a very confusing one at that. We will discuss that later. Not
on the first day. You don’t do the God stuff on the first day. We’ll do it in a more modern
context, when I think I’ll throw in a few remarks about Kierkegaard. He’s a philosopher who gives
a stunning attempt to defend Christianity in an era in which he says “Because all are
Christians, ipso facto, none are”. Which I think is a quite elegant and correct argument.
Structurally it is. Very interesting, but we will discuss that later. It’s a snotty thing to say, but it’s
worth saying.
So, the Christian era. And here is a vast wealth of views about the best kind of life for human
beings in the Medieval period. Modernist scholars, scholars who will concentrate on the figures
that I will after the break: Kant, Mill, and others vastly underestimate both the diversity of
knowledge in the medieval period and what it discovered in the sciences and so on. Now, we are
right that it was “The Dark Ages” in terms of the political dimensions I have been mentioning. But
then, we hardly have room to throw stones in that regard today either. So “The Dark Ages”… is
overkill.
In the Medieval period there are a lot of views, but it is fair to say, along with the sociologist Max
Weber, that the Middle Ages were somehow “enchanted”. Now, by that he meant that at the
centre of the ideologies in the West… remember as we do philosophy, it’s a Western discourse,
okay. It doesn’t mean that no other people in the world are good enough to do it. It means that’s
the way we have understood it here, and certainly it doesn’t mean that our way of doing it and
understanding it is at all right. I’ll come around to that, but only at the last lecture when we go
back over this train of doing Western philosophy. But in the West it’s important to remember that
this period was much more variegated than the simple “Dark Ages” account.
The Medievals though did live in a world kind of enchanted by an overarching belief system
which can be seen not just in their religious texts – in other words, not just in philosophy –
although there it is beautifully expressed by Aquinas – better expressed by Augustine, one of my
favourite writers – but by Aquinas, and then towards the Late Medieval period, Duns Scotus and
others. Saint Bonaventure and many other great writers. And some of them who disagree quite
wildly on many things. And that period produces one of the most elegant arguments in the whole
philosophical tradition, and that’s Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God,
which is the closest thing we have in philosophy to a knockdown argument. It argues that God
has got to exist, and if I have time I’ll run through it briefly here in a second.
But anyway I am trying, as I say, to draw this 2000 year period to a close in modernity, because
while this period is enchanted around a set of beliefs at which Christian… various Christian views
are at the centre, and in which society is, again, sort of hierarchically arranged with differential
relations to God, and yet each one of those mediated relations confers meaning. In other words
meaning not in some small sense like: “Well, my life has meaning. I have got a good job and a lot
of friends”. No, meaning in the sense that you are an actor in a cosmic drama, in which your
decision to… to sin, or not to sin, to be saved or not to be saved was crucially important in a big
cosmic drama. Which while your everyday life might be really bad… you know, “cave laborem”
was no fun. While that may not have been so hot, there was a way that your life had some
structure of meaning. Also, in this period of Western Civ… – and I think this is clearly right –
because all things were seen to be created, right. Then even the very rocks and stones, and you
know, Saint Francis and all this: the birds, the rocks, the trees, the stones, all were signs of God.
Now, that view of Christianity continues on at least until Melville. Why do you think he is so mad
at Moby Dick? You know… the good old Norman New Englander goes well: “I don’t understand” –
the Starbuck goes to Captain Ahab – “Why are you so mad at a poor dumb fish that did but strike
thee out of blind instinct”. And Ahab just said: “You’re crazy, all things are guided by…” – you
know, of course he doesn’t say the word “God”, that would have been a little over the edge –
“…by some inscrutable power that has hounded and dogged us since first we walked upon this
earth”. It is the thing behind the fish I cheaply hate, which is of course explains why Melville
thought he had written a very nasty book. He had, for that period.
In any case, the world of Melville that he evokes there – and in the medieval period which I don’t
think in some practical ways is at all over by then, and in some ways still isn’t over – was an
enchanted world. By enchanted, I don’t want you to get the happy idea, that Walt Disney notion
of it. But it does contrast with what Max Weber will talk about when I discuss these modern
philosophers, and that’s a disenchanted world.
And my easiest and quickest way to give you Max Weber on this is to suggest two things. One, a
disenchanted world is one in which there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place,
where quantitative relations (numerical ones) were more important than qualitative, by and large.
Where rules and procedures are followed, period. That’s procedural rationality for Weber. [It]
characterises bureaucracies and economies. Rules are followed. Period. It’s a principle of them.
But without giving you a lot of Max Weber, I can simply refer you to a better critic of bureaucracy,
Franz Kafka. So, if you want to read “Before the Law”, or “The Trial”, you get a better sense for
just exactly how disenchanted modern institutions can appear.
I mean, it is true that the justice of the medieval period was arbitrary, but while it was arbitrary,
there was something human about it. In other words, it could take account of differences. Under
procedural justice… if you have ever been in traffic court, you know how that works, right?
“Driving drunk – one year in jail, one hundred dollar fine, probation, one year in jail, hundred
dollar fine, probation…” Nobody cares why you were drunk, it doesn’t matter if Uncle Henry
died, it doesn’t matter, because there is a procedure and they follow it. That’s a disenchanted
world, one in which the rules are there. Now, in not all respects do I mean to that that is worse
than an enchanted one. Not at all. I just mean, that from our perspective now, we don’t want to
call that – “Modern life” – that’s so hot, and this other stuff the Dark Ages. It’s not that simple.
It’s not that simple.
Okay, so if one wanted a, sort of, moniker for the whole Medieval period, in one way or another
the imitation of a life like Christs guides that period to the extent that it’s possible for whoever
can do it, and to the extent that various groups start demanding a role in that life; because
struggle plays a role in each one of these social formations that I’ll have to wait until I discuss
Marx to get around to… but I am willing to wait.
Okay, I guess that now, since this is a philosophy course, I’ll give you a philosophical argument
since I have just been doing a talk about human values and laying out three positions. I hope I
have out there at least one Hedonist, one Stoic, you know… you can still be these things. I mean,
as far as I know, you can go down to the mall and get little books on them, and it even tells you
what to wear, and some of the things to say [crowd laughter].
Let me give you Anselm’s magnificent argument in the medieval period for the existence of God.
I don’t have it written down here, I’ll have to reconstruct it from memory. Now, you won’t
understand Anselm’s argument… Let me warn you in advance that many philosophers consider it
a trick. But to understand Anselm’s argument, you have to see that it’s an argument between
only two interlocutors: the fool who has said in his heart that there is no God, and the believer. If
you are neither, this argument won’t have any impact on you. In other words, if you are a person
who is not either someone who said there is no God or there is [a God] then you are really not a
party to this dispute. So in a certain sense I am not, and it gives me kind of the freedom to throw
the argument out quickly to you and let you consider it. But I do think that it’s important to point
out that as weird as it sounds today to believe in God and to do it seriously – it sounds weird to
me too, I am not up here preaching, I don’t… – I am not even suggesting this, it sounds
absolutely weird. In the history of philosophical discourse, this argument I am about to give is
the one that’s most nearly proved. It’s a very powerful argument, so…
It holds between interlocutors, one of which doesn’t believe and the other does. And the
argument goes something like this. It starts with a magnificent definition that is not an attempt
to tell us all about what God is, but about how we understand God, and that definition is as
follows: “God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived, period”. God is a being greater
than which cannot be conceived, period. Now, once you have bought that, you may see where the
argument is headed… The second premise is this one: “It is greater to exist in the mind and in
reality than in the mind alone”. Now, let me say a bit about those two premises, then I’ll quickly
give you the conclusion. The first one seems to be a simple definition about how we use the word
“God”. Namely, when we in the West say “God”, we mean “A being, a bigger one than which you
ain’t got”. So, it’s silly to us to go “Well, my God is going to whip yours, cause ours is just the
biggest there is”, so He is a being greater than which we can’t conceive. The second premise,
however, looks like a trick, but it isn’t. It’s directed at the non-believer. Because clearly the
dispute between the two is this: the non-believer also must accept the premise that “It’s greater
to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone”, because what the non-believer is
trying to argue is that God does not exist in reality. So, if he didn’t believe that, or she didn’t
believe it, there wouldn’t be a non-believer. They wouldn’t care about the dispute. So, here
Anselm has given two premises that seem to be absolutely acceptable to both interlocutors. But
from just those two premises, it follows that God must exist. Must exist. In Reality. Because if he
did not, we could conceive of greater.
Now, if you think that is a trick, I’ll just do it again [crowd laughter]. This is where we do
philosophy like: “Can he pull a rabbit out of a hat?”. I’ll do it again. Since it’s greater, you know,
to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone, and we are conceiving God… if we
conceive a non-existent God, that ain’t him. Because we could conceive of greater: one just like
that one, plus one that really exists. Follow me? So when you use the word, you are committed to
belief in God’s real existence. Anselm’s argument is elegant. In a dispute between believer and
non-believer, only on pain of absolute contradiction can you get out Anselm’s argument, it’s a
bind. Because God being a being greater than which cannot be conceived, if you buy the premise
that it’s greater to exist in reality and in the mind than in the mind alone, it follows that God
exists in reality and in the mind. So that’s Anselm’s Ontological argument. I won’t pursue what
has been pursued for, oh, a thousand years and more since, and that’s the whole series of
objections to this argument. I would simply say that in terms of an elegant conceptual argument,
it is perhaps one of the greatest in philosophy, and goes to show as Nietzsche once said that:
“Aren’t the strangest of things the most nearly proved?”. It looks like a trick, doesn’t it. The
argument kind of looks like a trick. I see [some you reacting as though]: “That’s kind of tricky”.
Maybe it is, but if it is, it’s a good trick.

Kant and the Path to Enlightenment (1990)


Transcript: I have the daunting task of summarising 2000 years in two sentences, so I’ll avoid it,
and hope that you saw the last tape. Which was basically… the movement so far is to present
something like a traditional history of ideas but – if you’ve noticed – with little rejoinders along
the way that suggest that that history of ideas is not innocent. Not as though it were being
presented in the way that the National Association of Scholars would have you believe. Books
being selected as though by very intelligent readers because they are the best books. That isn’t
always wrong, but the story of the survival of books and the formations of canons clearly has
other factors.
It couldn’t be accidental that the books we have discussed so far, and the movements are white,
male, viewed basically through the European axis, and will continue to be so. And that those
books got canonised cannot be a total accident. In other words, it just couldn’t be prima facie,
totally accidental that that occurred. So that would give you reason to suspect that there are
other factors. See, it’s not the argument that there are no factors of merit in the formation of a
canon, or a group of books called philosophy books or history books, but that the only factor
can’t be merit. There must be other factors. Material factors. Factors of groups that are
oppressed and so on, and those I’ll get to later. But… so I am not going to rehash the rather
quick run-through of that 2000 year period. Instead I am going to jump right into what… I have
already mentioned this man’s name before [Marx], I’ll mention it again [and] I’ll jump right into
modernity.
Now, modernity is a word that is thrown around a lot and in many contexts now in discussions of
art, in discussions of politics, and all over the place, sociology. In fact Sociology was born from a
distinction – modern sociology – from a distinction between modern and traditional societies.
Now, that is not a left wing distinction that only Marx had. You know, Marx wasn’t the only one
that noticed that, as it were, capitalism was different than feudalism. So did Tonnies, so did Max
Weber, and so did everyone else. So did Charlie Chaplin. In Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin knows
that something has happened, right. New kind of movements, the machines. I mean this not a
particularly…
So what we are going to do now is to move into a new kind of world, in which the problems of
everyday life from which philosophical problems arise and which they try to address in a certain
way [ideology]. Now that way is not simply as a compensation, although I have presented that as
one aspect of it. They also may be a way to evade the problems. That’s the sense in which Marx
uses the word ideology. You know, to evade, cover up or legitimate some illegitimate feature of
the problems in everyday life, and sometimes theories may even help respond to them. You may
think here of Dewey on progressive education.
In any case, the ethical views we are going to discuss now belong to modernity, to that modern
project that is historically and symbolically understood to begin somewhere around the French
Revolution. Understood by Marx as the victory of a class. A class of basically Merchants over a
class of Aristocrats. With the help of a massive number of workers who see more to gain under
the Merchants than under the Aristocrats. So that’s a brief story, but I still think a very plausible
one, you know.
At least in the absence of better stories, we stick with the best ones we have. So if you combine
Max Weber’s understanding of modernity, which has to do with bureaucracy, the State and the
increasing rationalisation of modern life. The areas subject to rational, procedural rules – that’s
one half of the story – and then the increasing commodification, or the extent to which the
economy plays a role in shaping everyday life. Those two halves of the story together, as it were –
for me – form the break into modernity, from earlier societies.
These ethical theories we will discuss now are very different than the other ones. I could present
other ethical views, like the Greek view of Excellence, the Roman view of Hedonistic pleasure, the
Christian view of imitating the life of Christ; to be a Christian, a Knight of Faith, and so on. Those
were character based views about how to live in a society. But with the advent of modernity, a
new problem arises. And that’s that human subjects for the first time get to be fragmented, as it
were, into individual atoms.
Now it’s very important to understand that this concept of the individual is a historical one. That
what we understand as our isolated little psyche – that little private spot in our head – and the
little wall of our body as being us is not a datum factum, but something that is theoretically
constructed and developed historically from other and differing views. In fact, on the planet
today there are differing views about it.
Now this new individual, according to Max Weber, would have a task that his feudal predecessor
couldn’t have had. At least under feudalism, no matter how lowly the serf, his life meant
something in this grander drama. The battle between God and the devil. One that we can still
enjoy vicariously, by watching The Exorcist, right? You go: “Oh, I remember that… Exorcist…
yeah, power of Christ…” and you know, go “Yeah, it’s great”, you know. You kind of vicariously
enjoy the past. It’s one of the features of this society we live in.
In any case, the important point here is that the new theories will not respond, as it were, to
character. Because what they will respond to are individual – individuated – actions. Single
actions. One way this distinction is made in philosophy is that previous ethical theories were
virtue ethics. That meant about the formation of good folks in good societies.
Under bourgeois views of ethics, like Kant’s, Mill’s and others, it won’t be. Ethics won’t be about
the formation of good folks in good societies. It will be a rather narrow enquiry into whether
action A, B or C is the correct one to perform. In other words, like everything else, ethics will
become more instrumental and more quantitative.
So if these views sound to you clearer than the, sort of, the ways of life that I have presented
rather broadly, they are clearer and more quantitative, but for very deep historical reasons.
Because they are trying to make up for a deficit that’s based on individuals now being
fragmented and separated in a society where social bonds are not as fundamental as procedural,
legal relations in the State, or as important as economic relations which become – for the first
time – a structuring principle of society. And that’s not meant to be a negative remark, I mean if
you think so, wait until I talk about Marx.
I mean, I think Marx had a lot more good things to say about capitalism than Bill Buckley. And in
the Manifesto, if you read it, it’s the greatest system ever. Unfortunately, it’s the worst too. Well,
we live in it, so we experience some of both. I mean, that’s not that bad an account. Anyway,
that’s all the background I want to do, because now we are moving from Virtue ethics to a kind
of ethics that’s supposed to answer for us individual subjects, who no longer have the
background of meanings to draw on, for right action. In other words, in the feudal period, a right
action is one recommended by mum and dad, as well brought up by the Church, and so on. So,
the key word for traditional society would be “authority”, you know.
And it would be important to understand that – while the French Revolution was a revolution – is
that the authority that can be recognised in a post revolutionary France: Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, bloody revolution… the only authority to be recognised after this historical break, in
principle, will be the authority of the autonomous individual. Kant says in a famous essay called
“What is Enlightenment?”, he goes: “The motto of the enlightenment is: ‘Dare to use your own
reason'”. All decisions henceforth, if you make them because somebody else told you – mum,
dad, the king, the prince, or even the government, or even God himself – for Kant
are heteronomous. All decisions henceforth must be autonomous. You’ve got to say it’s what you
want to do. A key and important advance – I am not presenting this negatively – an important
advance and a key moment in modernity. Autonomy becomes central to ethical decisions, I’ll get
onto that in just a moment. But it’s a broader point, because it’s a point about the kind of human
subjects that are being constructed by that new order. You know, we have got another one
coming. That new order is now quite old.
Okay, personally I hope I don’t bore you with this. I find Kant’s ethical theory exciting, and I am
going to try to make it exciting. Because to this day it is probably the highest achievement of this
society. And you can call it bourgeois, you can call it whatever you want to – using Max Weber’s
terms – that, for now, is not the argument. It’s a new kind of society, is enough for now. And
Kant’s argument is about how individuals in this society should judge their actions in terms of
right and wrong. Kantian ethics begins with the presupposition. And now that’s not surprising in
philosophy, because after all, as Hegel said: “One must begin”, and any beginning must
presuppose something. So, he presupposes something. And what Kant presupposes in his ethics
is that there is a moral law. He says that well, you know, some things are moral. There’s a moral
law. There are some things that are right and wrong. That isn’t questioned by Kant. Later
philosophers, I will argue, do question it.
Kant just goes: “Yes, some things are moral”. Now, that belief for Kant as a human being was
based on being raised by a couple of really good piteous parents. And it was just unthinkable to
him that in their whole lives they had never once obeyed a moral law. And in the empirical world,
if a moral law had been obeyed even once, then Kant’s style of arguing would allow him to argue
based on that presupposition: “How is it possible that there be a moral law?”. That is a standard
form of Kantian questioning. It’s to look at a practice and then to ask about that practice: “What
are the conditions for the possibility of it?”. That is the first meaning of “critique”, a dangerous
new form of thought that enters the world with the bourgeois era – critique, criticism – in a new
and radical way.
In any case, there is a moral law for Kant. How is it possible? Now, Kant is going to run through a
circular argument, which will hit… And I admit, by the way, that it’s circular. The question is: “Is
it a good circle?”. In other words, an interesting, enlightening one about our moral lives, or a
boring one. And I am going to try to make it interesting because I in part agree with it. Kant
begins with a series of identifications, the attempt being to not only answer: “How is the moral
law possible?”, but to try to do something that looks impossible as the argument goes along. And
that is to give the pure, abstract form of a moral law. A procedural one that will allow us to ask of
any specific moral law: “Is it really moral?”. And we’ll see when we get to that moment. I’ll have to
have a drum roll, because it’s one of the most famous philosophical arguments. But I have got to
get there, so let me get there.
Kant begins his argument by talking about the Will. Kant says that there is only one thing in this
world or out of it that is good without qualification, and that’s a good Will. The point Kant wants
to make here is that all these other things humans valued: happiness, courage, apatheia,
excellence. They are good, but only with qualification. For example, if it makes you happy to
murder innocent babies, well the happy part is good, but you have got to qualify it, right. You
don’t want to say “Well, it’s just good, period”. You’ve got to add a qualification. And if you say:
“Well, that person is an excellent chainsaw murderer”, that’s good that he’s excellent, but you’ve
got to qualify it.
So Kant points out that no, a good will is good, and you don’t need to qualify it. It’s just good.
That’s the first step in what I am going to admit is a circular argument. Why? Because now Kant
has to characterise what a good Will is. It’s not very informative to say, you know, “What is the
good?” and he goes “A good will”. You know, and “What’s a good Will?”, and he tells you what that
is. A good Will is one – and this is going to sound really anal, sorry. It’s Kant, I mean, you know –
a good will acts for the sake of duty alone. In other words, a good will does the right thing for
this reason: that it is the right thing, and no other. Not for the sake of gain, or happiness, or
inclination, but because it is your due. It’s the right thing to do. So there you answer Spike Lee’s
question “Do the right thing” by: you just do it because it’s the right thing, and for no other
reason. This makes his view very different than some others we will discuss.
In fact, Kant goes so far at one time as to suggest… and by the way, the book I am referring to
here is “The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals”, which is a very short little, very readable
book. It’s not exactly a coffee table edition, but it’s a very important text. Kant at one time goes
so far as to suggest that if you get a kick out of doing good – if you are sort of inclined to it – it
doesn’t count [crowd laughter]. You know what I mean? You know, and we have a kind of an
intuition that agrees with that. You know, in the word “do-gooder”. If you just do good because
you’re a do-gooder, it doesn’t really count. Goodness, for Kant, comes out of a struggle where
we… I mean, it’s sort of a more Christian notion of goodness. “We really want to sin…”, because
everybody who is honest with themselves is nostalgic for Christianity because we lost the most
fun part of it: sin, magnificent sin. You know, Mephistopheles: “Better to reign in hell than serve
in heaven”. You know, sin, boy, if we could just get that back we’d be somewhere. Sin. Well,
anyway…
To act because you want to – because you have a desire to do good and then you do it – for Kant
is nice. But it is morally… it’s indifferent. It’s like flossing your teeth. It’s a good thing to do. But
no badges, no medals, very little praise and honour for it. In a moral sense. No, morality comes
out of that struggle like: “I want to sin…”, and then no, you do the right thing. “I really want to
kill the S.B.”… You don’t, you do the right thing. So Kant sees morality in that kind of struggle
between our duty, which our reason… because reason is the big word of the enlightenment, you
know that, right? Reason as opposed to superstition. That’s what the Enlightenment, Modernity
and the Capitalists were selling against the King and the Church: reason. And I mean, I don’t
think that’s a bad idea.
So Kant sees this struggle between reason and our passions, when we went out and do what is,
you know, “right” procedurally, according to our reason then that’s doing the right thing for its
own sake, and that’s where we give moral praise. However, you may have noticed that so far we
have another circular account. Even if it turns out that the good Will acts for the sake of duty
alone, we still don’t know what the good Will is, because now any intelligent inquirer into how
they ought to act would go: “Well, what’s my duty?”. I mean, just doing my duty no matter what,
which of course – given that Kant is a German philosopher – conjures up problems. We know that
there are problems with just doing your duty no matter what. And by the way, so did Kant. His
emphasis on duty understands that you don’t do your duty no matter what, you have to
characterise what form it should take, so he does.
Duty – and now look at the circle here – duty is when one acts out of reverence for the moral law.
No chuckles out there, but there should be, because now we are right back where we started,
see. Started out with moral law and now we are back to it. Well, this is where the argument would
stop, and it would be a terrible argument, and would make Kant a very uninteresting moral
philosopher except that now Kant begins the impossible task of giving us a single, formalisable
moral law. Very important to understand that it’s – for him – it must be formalisable. A real
formula, usable to judge actions by. Remember, this is the Bourgeoisie era – this era of
the bourgeois – they won’t just take these fudgey “excellent” kind of criteria. They really want to
know if you are doing good. You know, your boss says “Did you have a good day?”, sometimes he
wants a real definite answer.
Well, here’s where the drum roll should come in, because Kant’s Categorical Imperative is a
magnificent achievement of the philosophical imagination. In the categorical imperative Kant
tries to give a single moral rule. General enough to cover all the Ten Commandments, and the
golden rule, and all other decent rules, and to exclude all of them that won’t fit those kind of
patterns. And he succeeds to an extent what I would have thought impossible. And I will quickly
tell you what the Categorical Imperative is. Now, he gives six or seven versions of it. To shorten
the day, I have selected one. The categorical imperative runs something like this. And so all you
have got to do is write this down and always do it, and you’ll be good. Congratulations. I don’t
think it’s that easy, but anyway.
The Categorical Imperative is “Always act so that you can will the rule of your action to be a
universal law”. Always act so that you can will – so that you can will – the rule of your action to be
a universal law. It is an imperative because it is a command. Categorical Imperative. It is an
imperative, because it’s a command. You remember Moses didn’t come down – you know, Chuck
Heston, right – he didn’t come down with the Ten Suggestions [crowd laughter]. So, like Kant
goes: “Moral rules are commands, not suggestions!”, so that’s the imperative part. Categorical,
because not hypothetical. You see, we have got to cover a moral theory later that says “You
should do action X, if something else”, which is a hypothetical. For Kant, it isn’t like that. It’s you
should do action X, period. Categorical sentence. Commands, as I say… Well, it’s the strong
sense of morality that lots of, sort of, you know, the older Americans [would identify with]… the
strong sense of morality.
Okay, what does it mean to always act so that you can will the rule of your action to be a
universal law? Well, it means that for every action you perform, you could conceivably write a
rule. You know, you’re tired, and you agreed to go out with someone, but you’re tired, and now
you don’t want to do it. So you lie to them. Now, you could write a rule about that, and it says:
“It’s okay to lie to people when you are tired, and don’t feel like keeping a promise”. Well, could
you? Under the rule I just read you, could you write such a moral rule consistently? No. Here’s
why not. Because, you would have to one, be willing to rule that as a universal law. Which means
that all humans begin to behave that way. Which would mean there would be no more promises,
binding obligations of any kind would disappear. And then whatever you might think about that
situation, some might like it, even me, it might be Anarchy, who knows. But for sure, the
institutions upon which the very rule is based would disappear. For Kant, that’s a sign you have
broken it. The second sign you have broken the Categorical Imperative is that it must be
reversible. By that – and this is as old as the Golden Rule. In fact, all it is a formal explanation of
the Golden Rule. You have to be willing to say: “Would I want anyone to do that to me?” and
answer “Yes”.
So, here are the criteria it has to meet. It has to be one, universalisable without restriction, and it
has to be reversible. Now, other than that there is no content to the Categorical Imperative. That
is its content: universal, and reversibility. Now, there are two other important points to make
about it quickly. No proper names ever go in moral rules. Now, I need to remind George Bush of
this. No proper names ever go in moral praise and blame, ever. Because these imperatives hold
for all or none. So, no group names go in there, there are no moral rules that go: “Thou shalt tell
the truth, except for African-Americans who we know are liars”, or, “Thou shalt be honest,
except for Arabians”, or something. No! Moral rules are not like that. Gotta be good for everyone,
or they are no good for anyone. They are not even moral if they are not universalisable. And they
are also not moral if you can pick out unique exceptions to which they for some unusual reason
don’t apply. They have got to apply universally. This is Kant’s theory anyway.
Now, what’s more interesting than this so far, are the principles that Kant draws from the
Categorical Imperative. And some of which have remained extremely important to us today – and
one is still important to me now – I think at least one of them. He draws from this Categorical
Imperative four principles. The first one, is one that if it were followed, as a moral rule, would
make the capitalist economy impossible, at least in its current form. It would also make the state
socialist economies that just fell impossible, which they already are under their present form.
Anyway, it’s the “Ends Principle”. The Ends Principle – Kant says – follows from the Categorical
Imperative and the Ends Principle is as follows: “Always treat others, and yourself as though you
were an end, and never a mere means”.
You need to think about that one for a while. Always treat other people as an end, and never as a
mere means. Now, my West Texas boys way of saying that is “Don’t use folks”. Don’t use them.
That means, don’t hire them at Burger King so you can make extra money as an Assistant
Manager, so you can… because you are using them. That’s what I meant about it would make
official economy impossible, to follow that moral rule. You can’t use folks. Don’t use them.
Because the Ends Principle tells you that you treat your own life as an end. In other words, you
don’t treat yourself as a means generally speaking, you treat your activities as ends. I mean, well,
“This is me, I am doing it”, it’s an end. But when you treat someone instrumentally, it’s not what
happens.
Frequently… and this comes up at Duke University and it probably comes up in dating out in the
more adult world of multiples, singles, polymorphousness, and all, you know, all the new talk
shows, Oprah and whatever. Dating is frequently not a relation that obeys the Principle of Ends.
Frequently the situation is one in which somebody is supposed to use someone else as a means
to an end. Well, it’s wrong, according to Kant because you should never treat any person –
including yourself, by the way – as a mere means, but only as an end. That’s the Ends Principle.
Connected to that, and connected to the imperative is one that I think is worth fighting over.
I said I deeply believe in some principles. This is one I deeply believe in: The Principle of
Freedom. Which is we must always act under the practical postulate that our will is free. Now,
here is what Kant is saying, and I think it’s worth remembering. That we all have these arguments
that we can’t do anything about something, and that so much stuff is going on, how can I help?
For Kant, none of that works. It’s all excuses. Later, Sartre will call it “Bad Faith”. The practical
postulate under which you should morally act is that you are free. Now, why does Kant call it a
practical postulate? It’s simple. Because you can’t show that you are free, you may not even be
free, in other words you could even be in prison – as Sartre says – or you could be determined by
psychological, social factors, whatever. But you should act under the practical postulate that your
moral decision makes a difference.
Now – if you have noticed – so far all Kant is doing is giving us an account of what a lot of folks
think moral action is anyway. Sort of, maybe this one is controversial, but we’ll see. In any case,
that practical postulate is one that you have all adopted today, whether you knew it or not.
Because hardly anyone gets up in the morning and dresses themselves as a cleverly constructed
automaton, and says: “I wish I could freely do something today, but since there was the Big Bang
and I know the laws of physics and biology and behavioural science, that means I am going to go
through the day like an automaton. No. Practically speaking, you got up and went: “Hell, I am
going to go to the talks”, right? As though you were free to do it. And, you’re here! Great.
But, it’s funny when we turn to politics we forget this. We go “Well, you know, there is just
nothing I can do…”. Well, Sartre called that Bad Faith because… in other respects you act under a
practical postulate. Act as though you are free. You might get lucky. You might be free, who
knows! Act that way. It’s worth trying! I mean, it’s better than being a slave to try that [acting
free]. Well, anyway this is not some lefty idea. This is the greatest bourgeois ethicist. I mean this
is your own revolution, folks, you know.
Now, connected to the principle of freedom is one I am equally attached to. The principle of
autonomy. Always act so that you can regard your own will as making universal law. Now this is
more responsibility than most people want. This means that when you decide, you ask your
question… you ask this question. You decide autonomously. That means not under the will of
another. In here [bangs chest]. Autonomously in your heart, and in your mind. And autonomy is a
beautiful word. You act autonomously.
Now, what does it mean. What does it mean to regard your own will here as making universal
law? It means this. That you would be willing for everyone else to act just as you did. So that if
you make a perfect ass of yourself, and you do it autonomously, you are at least willing that
everybody else do it – and you may be! See, that’s not inconsistent with autonomy.
On the other hand, autonomy is a frightening principle. Because even Kant says if God himself
were to come down and to give you a moral directive, if you followed it, that would be non-
moral. It wouldn’t be wrong, but it wouldn’t morally count. If God said: “Go over there”, and you
did it, it would be okay, but it wouldn’t be moral. Moral stuff comes from you. The decisions you
make. Not from the decisions others make for you. So if you are a patriot because everybody else
is, even if you decided to agree with them, it ain’t worth diddly. Not morally. It has to come from
you. For me, that is a powerful principle, it’s the Principle of Autonomy.
Now Kant, sort of, caps this off now by returning in a strange way to our earlier questions about
what human beings are like. And then one last point and then I am through with Kant. I hope I
am on time. Yeah, okay…
Kant says that the human capacity to be a moral agent, just that capacity that we have to ever act
morally… and remember this is not some loony argument. Kant is procedurally describing what
moral behaviour would look like, while just holding to one side the question of whether very
many people ever actually act this way. He’s just saying if there is moral action, it has got to look
like this. It can’t be some smidgey thing about “Well, I am nice…”. It can’t be that. That’s his
argument anyway.
The human capacity to be a moral agent in this strong sense gives each human what Kant calls –
and what I think is worthy of calling – “dignity”. And dignity for Kant means an unconditional
worth. Human dignity means that each one of these newly constructed bourgeois individuals has
unconditional worth. Which, as an insight – I think – many of us share. You hear of a settlement
of a wrongful death suit. And all of us can feel the pain of the judge trying to put a dollar amount
on it. Why? Because we know from this Kantian insight – and our own autonomous insight – that
a human life doesn’t have that kind of value. It’s not a quantitative value. Because that human
being could be a moral agent, the value of that life is unconditional. Which means that it’s not a
monetary one. It has an unconditional value.
Now, the sort of, last part of Kant and then we are through with him for a while. The last part is
where he ties all this up… All this so far is about how individuals act – and what they are – if
there’s morals. If there is a moral law. But, if each one of us acted this way in regard to each
other one of us, we would be in a state that Kant calls “The Kingdom of Ends”. A kingdom of ends
would be a place where all of us in our mutual relations with one another treated each other as
ends and not as mere means. Where each one of us granted the other his (or her) autonomy, and
we are similarly granted our autonomy. In which each one of us decided autonomously on our
freedom and is granted the same right by each and every other one.
A kingdom like that, for Kant, would be one in which no-one – again to make it simple and “West
Texas” – in which no-one uses anybody. Nobody gets used. And that’s how Kant wraps up what I
consider a fascinating and one of the most important moral accounts of this period of
philosophy. It’s that the last goal is to reach a situation where we could live in a kingdom of
ends. By the way he says that it would be one of perpetual peace. That of course, as we know, we
are still waiting on because there’s another new order coming. Okay, I am not going to have time
to do as much as I wanted to do, because I did more with Kant than I intended to do.
Let me contrast Kant’s morality, which today goes under the name of “Deontology“, namely
morality that, you know, is about these fundamental rules – rule governed morality – versus a
morality that all of you will be familiar with, so it will require a very short explanation. It’s Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s moral principle, and I am going to give you Mill’s version of it,
and it’s called Utilitarianism. And Americans ought to know all about this, it’s in Star Trek
movies, it’s all over the place. And so, I’ll give you the utilitarian principle, and I can do it quickly,
because it is based on Hedonism. But it is not based on individual hedonism, but on social
hedonism. Now, I’ll try to explain that. You’ll understand it once I read the principle, and you
already know it, I think.
We should always act so as to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Now there is
one rule on the one side, on the other the categorical imperative says that we should always act
so that the rule of our action could be willed by us to be universal, and on the other side, the
principle that we should always act to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. For
Mill and Bentham, it’s clear that happiness is the greatest good. It’s clear. And they give a kind of
empirical argument for it – even though that’s not elegant philosophically – they say: “We know
happiness is good because that’s what people go after, so, it’s good”. It’s kind of simple minded,
but that’s what led Nietzsche to say that Mill was a blockhead, I mean… but anyway [crowd
laughter]. In fact, Nietzsche went further. He said “Human beings don’t want happiness, only the
English want that”.
Okay so “the good” here is happiness. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as “the greater
happiness” principle. And calculation is no problem here. You may go: “Well, you couldn’t be
utilitarian because you couldn’t calculate”. But in fact the Utilitarian response to that is flat footed
and rather – you know – smart. And that’s that you do it all the time. Every time you buy a car,
every time you risk driving anywhere, you calculate. “Easier to get to the airport by car, or easier
to get Ma to drive me? Easier to go here to do that… better to go to Yale than to Harvard?…”, and
so on. So, you may say that in objection to this theory that you can’t do it, but you do it all the
time. You make utilitarian calculations.
In fact, these two moral theories – in terms of just pure moral theories – still dominate all
standard philosophical discussion. Now, it’s clear to me that one of them is more interesting
than the other. I think you know which one is more interesting to me. [crowd laughter]. But I have
got to warn you that there are knock-down objections to both, and by knock-down objections, I
mean knock-down objections. We know that these theories are wrong because there are knock-
down objections to them. The best way to look at both of them however might be as models of
moral action. If by models we don’t mean the shopping mart idea of something we do once in a
while, but as a way to think about a moral life, if you are interested in it. Some people aren’t
interested in it, but if you are, it’s a way to think about it. But the objections are important to see.
The classic objection to Kant’s Categorical Imperative is that it is empty of content, period,
because it depends on what someone is willing to will. So, if you asked Charlie Manson:
“Charlie…” – you know who Charlie Manson is? – “Charlie, are you willing to will your actions to
be universal?” What gives us a good reason to think Charlie Manson won’t go: “Why not, I am the
meanest S.B. in the valley”. You see, at the bottom line, all Kant could say to him is “Well, you are
just not a rational moral agent”, which isn’t much of an answer to Manson now is it? You see, the
problem that is paid for making your moral theories universal at that level is you lose content.
But now the utilitarian principle also has a deep problem that I have to mention. Very unfortunate
problems with it. One of them being that it seems to violate our sense of justice. I’ll use one
example here. We have a device that will allow us to execute someone on television the
way Attorney General Maddox in Texas wanted to do it. To scare people. But only Maddox and
one scientist know that the device actually blows the prisoner, atomises him, and sends him away
to the Blessed Isles.
Now, here is the other device, which is the normal Texas electric chair. Now, both of them have,
by my example, the same effect on the public in terms of utility. They reduce crime, thus making
for greater happiness for a greater number of people. But which one should the utilitarian prefer?
The one that actually executes the prisoner or the one that blows him to the Blessed Isles, by
Utilitarian principles? Yes or Nos are okay. The Blessed Isles. But that doesn’t seem fair now, does
it? Why should he get to go to the Blessed Isles, just because of this blessed principle? You see:
you want to say “Blessed Isles or no Blessed Isles, happiness or no unhappiness, that isn’t fair”.
So, fairness is the thing that Kantian ethics seems to capture better. But Utilitarian ethics seems
to capture content and real decision making frequently better than Kant’s ethics. So they both
have strong points and weak points, and that’s important to remember.
There is another really bad thing about Utilitarian ethics taken too seriously. By that I mean,
taken as more than a model of moral reasoning. Say your kid has got an IQ of 110 and is lazy.
You love him though. The neighbour’s kid has got an IQ of 140, busy, has got a Gilbert chemistry
set as big as the wall, and you have got only enough money to send one kid to medical school,
and you are a convinced Utilitarian. Whose kid are you going to send? Neighbour’s kid. Some
people wouldn’t think that was moral though. Why? Well, because both these moral theories – it’s
important to remind you now – ignores so much of our lives. Things like friends, family, special
relations, ethnic relations, gender relations, class relations. Why are all these things ignored? Well
because they are bourgeois moral theories. That’s why, among other things – among other
reasons – that’s why they are ignored.
Anyway that’s – to this day – the two primary moral theories. The Utilitarian principle – the
utilitarian theory – and Kant’s. By the way, the Utilitarian theory has wide application besides
philosophy. When you hear these economists on Nightline, be sure to remember that they are all
working with utility based models. But the foundations underneath those models are quite shaky.
I’ll give you one last moral example during the next talk, before we get onto it. I think that’s time
to wrap up this one, isn’t it? I think…

Mill on Liberty (1990)


Transcript: Okay, we ended the last lecture by discussing the Utilitarian ethical theory which is
that we should always act so as to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number,
and Kant’s ethical theory that we should always act so that the rule of our action could be willed
by us to be universal law, and then we raised objections to both those. Now, a further reminder is
in order, and it’s very important. And it’s one of the reasons I call these “models” of moral
reasoning, because I wanted to distinguish them from the real, embodied contexts in which
moral conflicts come up. And one of the ways to do that is to direct an objection at Kant, and
then direct one at sort of both theories, and this is one more objection for Kant then.
What happens when you are trying to will a universal principle in a situation where two principles
are clearly good, and yet you can’t do them both, and one has to fall. The classic case is this… In
fact, it’s not a classic case. Our moral life is filled with situations where it isn’t just right or
wrong, most of us know in those cases what to do. We may not do it, but we know what we
ought to do.
The really interesting cases in our moral life is where there are two things that look good, and we
can’t do them both. So for example, and this is a very thin philosopher’s example, I’ll give you a
thicker one later. So for example, someone comes to your door who looks like they may have
worked for the CIA and says: “Where is your room mate?”. Now, it seems that you could act on
the principle – a hallowed biblical commandment – “Thou shalt not lie”. Your room mate is in
there, and you go: “Bill’s in there”. But you see a little, you know, bulge in the guy’s pocket, a
national security patch, and you know that Bill used to be a drug smoking crazed person, so you
don’t feel safe for Bill, and it seems that there is another principle, equally universalisable, that
one should act so as to protect the innocent, and you know Bill is innocent. The other guy
doesn’t know it, but you know it.
There are two rules, both perfectly good Kantian rules, right? Would be willing to act by them all
the time, be willing to rule them both. The problem is you can’t do both, gotta pick one. So…
and this is an interesting part where Utilitarian theory is, I guess, a little better. What you fall
back on in that situation looks like Utilitarianism. You go, well which one of these is going to,
you know, lead to the best results? And you just blithely lie to the guy, I hope, and say “Bill ain’t
here”. Well, you broke Kant’s rule, but you had to break one of them. That doesn’t seem that that
helps Kant’s theory, in fact it doesn’t help it at all. It doesn’t help Utilitarian theory much either
though, as I am about to point out. Because both theories fail to capture real moral conflicts as
they are embodied in problematic situations.
So now unfortunately, instead of referring to a movie that all of you have seen – although some
of you may have seen it – I’ll refer to a book. There is actually a movie too, and a moral dilemma
in the book that I think gives us a sense for this. It’s a book by John Fowles called “The Magus“. I
hope some of you have read it. If you haven’t, there is also a movie with Anthony Quinn, called
“The Magus” with the same moral dilemma in it, and here it is.
A mayor of a small Greek village being occupied during the Second World War by the Nazis.
There are some resistance fighters in town – only three of them – but they shoot three German
officers on the beach. So, the German officers decide to retaliate, and they bring into the centre
of the square a thousand of the women and children of the city and put them in this little
encirclement. They capture the three resistance fighters, and of course symbolically put them on
three posts. Very nice. They bring the mayor out, and they give him the following choice. And
you would think that a moral theory might help with this. They say: “Look. If you shoot the three
in front of your town’s people, then we’ll let everybody out of the pen.
So there’s a good utilitarian thing you ought to do, right? Shoot them quick, because that’s three
lives against a thousand, and the Utilitarian calculation is simple: shoot ’em for the greater good.
Even though shooting them is wrong according to Kant, you do it because there is nothing else
that you really can do: do it, it’s for the greater good. So the Utilitarian principle looks
overwhelming in this case. On the other hand, you might have the insight that you couldn’t do it
anyway, the Germans might shoot those three and the thousand, but you couldn’t do it. That
would be the Kantian insight.
Now it turns out though that in our real moral lives, things are much muddier than that, because
he struggles with the decision, and decides to shoot the three guys. Safest thing to try. So he
goes up and he begins to shoot them, and the Germans have pulled a small trick on him. They
have unloaded the rifle, so he can’t shoot them. He’ll have to club them to death.
Now, according to these very pretty moral theories that we have been discussing, should that
make any difference? Haven’t we abstracted from any difference it should make? Should it make
any difference? Clearly the answer is “No, it shouldn’t”. The same calculation should apply. Just…
a good utilitarian… I could club him or just shoot him. It’s a little bit harder, will take longer, but
you know, same calculation. So he starts to raise the club up to hit the guy in the centre who
utters the word “freedom”. The Greek word for “freedom”. He drops the rifle. The Nazis kill all the
thousand, and the three.
That moral story I have related to you, not simply for its barbarism, but to show you that in
embodied contexts it may not do a damn bit of good to know the rule. You may not be able – for
embodied reasons – to club another human to death, even if it is the right thing to do. So that is
to remind us that the moral life is complex. These theories are abstractions from the real
communities, societies and systems of oppression under which we learn to follow moral rules.
You have got to remember that to understand anything about politics or morality, right?
It’s that in real situations the simple rules of either one of these views; utilitarian, Kantian may
not work. They may not work because you woke up that day with a toothache. In other words, life
has many contingencies, and you just may not be doing the right thing one day because your
face hurts too much. It may not be as dramatic, in other words, as the example from the film. But
that example is supposed to – in a very striking way – remind you that the moral life is filled with
ambiguities, and that the problems you may face in making a decision of that kind have a large
background.
Okay, I want to stop with that, in terms of the discussion of Kant and Mill – in particular
Utilitarian theories for a moment – I will return to them later, and Kantian style theories. By far, I
think, the most influential of the two in our society especially when we justify public policies, are
the Utilitarian principles. It’s clear to me now that our state isn’t run on Kantian principles
because we treat differential groups differently, and Kant wouldn’t accept that. So then we have
to have other kinds of justifications, which is that some greater good must come about, or
should come about.
So I will return the critique of Utilitarianism. In the meantime though, I want to return to this
“freedom” thing, which I have already introduced Kant’s concept of freedom. One might call it a
very absolute concept: the kingdom of ends. Now I am going to present two others to conclude
today, and I’ll get around – since I like this “freedom” thing – I’ll get around to some more of that.
The most famous account in the nineteenth century – there are two competing ones – and this is
after Kant. Kant’s is earlier. One of these books I think is on most bookshelves, around
universities for sure: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”. Many of you have probably read this, heard it
referred to many times. I am going to briefly discuss this one, and I am going to distinguish two
– what Sir Isaiah Berlin calls – two concepts of freedom. They are at odds with one another. The
struggle between these two concepts of freedom go on within this country, and between
countries.
And these concepts of freedom are not abstractions to the extent that they are rooted in the real
struggle – embodied struggle – of human subjects to gain freedom. This word itself is used as a
material force in the battle, if you know what I mean. When you see these struggles, you hear this
word: “freedom”. It’s part of the struggle to announce it, that it’s your aim, without necessarily
filling it with content, as I’ll talk about when I finish today.
Well, “On Liberty” is a famous book on freedom, and it’s a position that has been used by
classical Liberals as well as people today who would call themselves Conservatives, and I’ll give
you this argument very briefly, and I’ll try to give it very succinctly. “On Liberty” tries to answer
the following question. Now remember, Mill is a utilitarian, okay, so there may be some tensions
between him being that, which he sees as very important. But freedom, he also sees as very
important. So there may be some tension in the two accounts, but we won’t worry about that for
now.
In “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill wants to do one simple thing. He wants to show us where the
grounds are for the government’s legitimate interference with our liberty. Mill wants to answer
the question “When can the state legitimately interfere with our liberty”. You have got to
understand that Mill’s question is one of legitimacy, and not of power. Please understand the
difference. The State always has the power to interfere with us. Nearly always. This isn’t about
that, this is about liberty. About when does it have – not the power but – the right to do so.
So Mill comes up with a very radical principle, and it’s called the “Harm Principle”. The only
legitimate ground… This is Mill’s Harm Principle. Actually he presents two, but again for the sake
of being concise, we are going to discuss one I consider the most important. Mill’s Harm
Principle is the following. The only legitimate ground for social coercion is to prevent harm to
others, period. The Harm Principle. The only time the State can interfere with our liberty is to
prevent us from harming others. That is a very wide standard indeed, because today that would
shut down huge sections of it, wouldn’t it? But it is in a way a very reasonable principle, and I
want to argue for it briefly.
Harm here – and this is important to understand the principle – means genuine harm. It does not
mean offence. The State doesn’t have the right – according to Mill – to interfere with our liberty
for offending people. In fact, for Mill, a society that interferes with our liberty simply because we
offend someone doesn’t deserve the name “free”. Just doesn’t deserve it. So if it irks you that
someone burns a flag, unless they throw it on your body and burn you, the state has no right to
coerce it. It does not have that right. Not if you want to use the word “free” society to mean “free”
society, according to Mill. So we are talking about genuine harm and not offence, okay. Now this
principle has not only come under assault like I have suggested, from people like Jesse Helms,
who consider all the arts since Norman Rockwell to cause genuine harm.
It’s also come under some assault – and I don’t intend to assault these potential political allies by
talking about it too much – by feminists, who consider issues like pornography to be very
problematic in this regard. Because on this strong account of genuine harm I am giving, war toys
and pornography also don’t count as genuine harm unless someone takes playboy and whams it
through your midbrain or takes a war toy and hits you with it. Because if the Harm Principle does
not mean genuine harm – it means this sort of amorphous social harm – then it’s really no secure
principle at all, right? Because then Jesse Helms might get elected, and God knows what he thinks
might harm everyone. It might harm you watch TV, it might harm you to read a book.
So the genuine Harm Principle needs to be stated in this rather vigorous way because what it’s
trying to back up, among other things are the freedoms that were won by the American
revolutionaries in the Bill of Rights. The constitution itself on my historical view is a conservative
counter-revolutionary document. The Bill of Rights on the other hand is what the revolutionaries
got to go along with the deal. They wouldn’t go along… we fought too hard to have worse laws
than the English have, we’ve got to put a Bill of Rights on it. So I come from a Bill of Rights
tradition of freedom, in my own view. And I think there’s where the Harm Principle applies.
This kind of freedom admittedly leads to a society where very sick people do very sick things and
we get real mad about it. The alternative is a famous slippery slope, and that’s when you start
stopping them without a principle because you are offended. Even if bunches of you are
offended, somebody’s got to decide. Mill’s idea is that once you give that power to anyone,
you’ve lost liberty. You have lost it. It’s like getting a little bit pregnant, once you lose a little bit
of it, it’s over… or being just a little bit [pregnant]. It’s over. It’s that fundamental a principle for
Mill.
Now the conservative counter principle oddly enough… and I am using conservative loosely here,
because this gets messed up all over the board. But a counter principle here is the Offence
Principle, and you have all heard it thrown out in public debate as well. And that’s where society
has a legitimate right to socially coerce people to keep them from offending others. And then
that requires a further argument because such offence, and here is the famous phrase from a
long gone debate: “Because such offence undermines the moral tone of society”. Well you know
Mill wouldn’t have bought that, I mean, it’s too mucky. But think how often you have heard it in
debate: “Well we can’t have those Mapplethorpes, if people look at them it will undermine the
moral tone… Well that’s not a good argument, I am sorry. If you are in this Mill tradition of the
Bill of Rights, that’s not a good argument.
Now, there is an argument in the Mill tradition that helps and that’s that we also – because we
don’t have the right to coerce people – we don’t have the right to drag people down to a
Mapplethorpe exhibit and cement their eyes open, and glue their face to one of Mapplethorpe’s,
you know, pictures… to try to… it’s hard to do this, you know, in a general way. [crowd laughter]
Similarly, TV. And this is a very difficult argument for me now because it’s hard to know what
turning off television would be like. [crowd laughter]. I mean we used to watch it, now it watches
us. How do you turn it off? [crowd laughter]. But I mean Mill’s idea would be: “Well, turn it off if
you don’t like it”. Now, that’s become more problematic. I really think it has. Because TV plays an
enormous role in creating social reality, it is not a simple part of it. It is not a home appliance.
That’s a big mistake, to think about your TV as just an appliance. I mean to use a Platonic
metaphor, it is “The eye of God“. It’s in your house, and it’s scary, and it’s there. It is more real in
a way, and more frightening.
In any case that makes us wonder about whether we could maintain the genuine Harm Principle
or not. But the major way in which this principle has been attacked is because this principle –
“Genuine Harm” – makes a distinction between self regarding actions: those that only affect me,
and other regarding actions: those that affect other folks. That distinction is where people try to
attack the Harm Principle. Because some people argue there is no such thing as purely self
regarding actions.
For example, by Mill’s analysis, if someone wants to be a druggie and has a good enough supply
of drugs that they don’t run out and harm others, because if they do that then they violate the
principle. But if you are a druggie and you want to sit around all your life and do drugs, that’s a
purely, on Mill’s account, self regarding action, and the State has no business stopping you. On
the other hand, if you want to go out and shoot up the neighbourhood click-click-click-click-
click, hit all the kiddies, get your face, you know, usually a swarthy one, in one of Barbara Bush’s
commercials that will later appear in some Republican presidential ad. If you want to go out and
do that, you have violated the Harm Principle.
Now here’s the possible objection to Mill’s principle. Is it really true that there are self regarding
actions? Or isn’t it true that the junkie, in his relations with others – which he hardly could
separate himself from totally – isn’t going to have effects that will lead to genuine harm. So there
is room for debate over the Harm Principle. My own inclination is to stick with it. I mean, that’s
my inclination. The Harm Principle though, you need to understand, is very important to the way
that our society understands its legal codes, and some of our best justices have appealed to it
over and over.
The two principles – I want to mention them again – that stand in the way of it, or at dispute with
it. One is the Offence Principle I have already mentioned. The other is a principle of Paternalism.
And it’s a principle that I have to admit – given my political proclivities I have to admit it, it’s
okay – that the liberal tradition at least in its earlier incarnations was guilty of. And that’s the
Paternalism Principle. Which is we can interfere with people for their own good. That also is
inconsistent with Mill, because on Mill’s view of liberty, the best judge of your own good is you.
Which would have led, if you had believed a Mill style liberty argument, and combined it with an
argument I am about to make in a minute, you would have had an elegant public policy for
dealing with poverty. And that’s to close down a multi-trillion dollar bureaucracy and give poor
people money. Under the principle that free people will know better how to spend their money
than others know how to spend it for them.
And since what makes poor people poor is that they don’t have money, it seems remarkably
elegant to solve the problem by giving it to them. It is so remarkably and shockingly elegant, all
it would do is reduce the population of this city by one half. I mean that’s all it would… [take].
And they could go live somewhere else, right? There would be more room to walk around the
parks and stuff. No joke, I mean if that’s poverty – not having money – reducing it would be
giving money. And the only counter argument must come from this spirit of Paternalism. That
means someone must know better than they do how to spend it. Again, on Mill’s grounds that’s
not a very good account of liberty.
Now let me give some dimensions to the Harm Principle and then I am through with Mill’s
account of Liberty, even though we will return to it if you would like. The Harm Principle has
some dimensions that Mill discusses. Harm to others, I have already mentioned, is genuine harm.
Mill discusses harm to self. Mill doesn’t seem to have a good argument against suicide, okay.
Doesn’t seem to. If anything is a self regarding action, that might look like one, you know. That’s
it, I am out of it, don’t worry about it. Especially if you leave enough insurance to handle it, right,
it doesn’t… and if you have a suicide thing [cover]… anyway.
Well, the way that that’s been handled in the Mill tradition is that social coercion can be used
there if it can be shown that the person engaging in the action… that their decision is
encumbered. And it’s important that we don’t make that a fuzzy principle. By encumbered
decision, we mean these examples I have been using, like a potential suicide, a drug addict, or
someone who is a head banger. You know, a psychotic who is a head banger. Then, even though
they are only harming themselves, even by Mill’s principles, later “Millians” have admitted that we
– that the state – might have the right if their decision is clearly encumbered. But you have to be
careful, because you’ll get some conservative on the abortion issue arguing that no woman could
choose there, because under that emotional stress her decision is encumbered. No, that’s wrong.
Mill’s encumbered principle means really encumbered: crazy, dog drunk, that kind of thing. Not,
you know, “I am upset today, so I can’t be free”, no, you’ve got to be really out of it okay.
The second, I mean the third… there’s harm to others, harm to self… Another dimension that I
haven’t mentioned yet is very important to see. And this is one where I think Mill, and later
people in his tradition have given up too much. And that’s that our freedoms can be curtailed if
they interfere with the freedoms of others. Not just genuine harm, but if our freedoms interfere
with other people’s freedoms. Now, while I will admit that that can sometimes happen, I think
that the use of that argument against Mill’s strong principle has been largely invidious. That
means, you know, you’ve got the Secretary of State and his hand picked audience of 8000 people
all cheering and yelling, and one person shouts and they throw him out because he is interfering
with the 8000 people’s right to free speech. Well that’s Mill backwards, because Mill had this idea
in order to protect the rights, not of everybody who agrees, because you don’t need your rights
protected.
If you are in a room full of 100 people and 90 of them agree on something, they don’t need their
rights protected on that issue, right? Because they all agree. It’s the four or five lunatics that may
have something creative and new to add to the discussion without which you can’t have
democracy, and without which this principle, you know, won’t flourish. And I hate to mention it,
but it’s not different than Chairman Mao’s principle. Let a thousand schools of though contend,
let a thousand flowers bloom, I mean… the idea is that even the most whacko ideas, in a free
society, get heard.
And that’s a deeply American principle too. I mean, Thoreau argued that anyone who was more
right than his neighbours was a majority of one already. The truth is not majoritarian. True
things are true for the simple and tautological reason that they are true. And votes don’t count.
George Bush can get 98 votes… percent… and it don’t mean he’s right, or that he’s telling the
truth. It won’t mean that, because truth is… you don’t vote on it… it’s not a voting matter. True
things are true because they are true, not because people believe them, even if overwhelming
numbers believe them. Okay that’s all on Mill for now.
Mill’s account of freedom has become very famous, and it’s had a very salutary impact in political
theory, but it has a profound limitation. And this has been pointed out by Sir Isaiah Berlin and
others. It is an account of what Berlin calls “negative freedom” only. In other words, it is an
account of freedom from constraint, but… it has nothing to say about this incredibly important
dimension of freedom: freedom to, or “enabling freedom”, see. There is a difference between
freedom from constraint, and freedom to. Well, the first one: freedom from is “negative
freedom”, the second: freedom to, is positive… You can take those as value neutral words, I
mean, Berlin did. They are two different traditions of talking about liberty.
Freedom to, “enabling freedom” is best introduced – and I’ll hold up another book – a good
discussion of it is in Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts“, but Voltaire and others
have discussed positive freedom, so it’s not just Marx, but other people too… and I intend to.
The need for a concept of positive freedom – not to overcome Mill’s important principle, but to
supplement it – seems to me obvious. Because here is a dimension of freedom that Mill’s
argument won’t handle.
It’s summed up in the famous French joke: “The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under
the bridges at night”. One suspects such a concept of freedom is very poverty stricken. I do. I
think that’s a very thin notion. Like I think the notion of “volunteer” is a very thin notion.
McDonalds, Jail. High percentages in both. Drugs in the street, the army, volunteer. Very thin
notion of volunteer. Freedom, to mean something, has to have a positive component. A
component that enables you to exercise your rights.
The right of free speech is no good if you haven’t been enabled by education to talk well, and to
speak and find a place to speak. The right to travel freely is no good if you don’t have a car. And
even simple rights, like the right to survive – forget pursue happiness – just [the right] to survive.
That right, which ought to be a right. You know, by “ought”, I am appealing to Kantian insights.
Which ought to be a right. Even that right can’t be secured if you don’t have enough money for a
hamburger at least, or a Baby Ruth or whatever.
So, clearly there is a need for a principle of positive freedom that enables people to do
something. Let me make the distinction clear again. As far as I know there are no laws
or juridical rules that constrain me from owning Mobil Oil, being best friends with Mel Gibson, or
dating Kathleen Turner. However, I am missing some of the enabling conditions. [crowd
laughter]. I don’t have enough money to buy the oil, I am a little too short and fat, you know, to
be a friend of Mel’s… and Kathleen Turner is out of the question. [crowd laughter]
But, the point is very important, and especially if we are going to bandy this word “democracy”
and “freedom”… these words around. Because you can’t have a free society that doesn’t have
positive freedoms for people… that doesn’t enable them to exercise freedoms. Has to be more…
a thicker notion.
Now the debate would come on: how thick does the notion have to be? You know. Well, for Marx,
as you know, infamously, and he’s supposed to be dead wrong… it’s supposed to be so thick
that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need“. Which is a principle, as
you may have noticed, that people that work for the Bechtel Corporation observe among each
other… Seriously.
You know, I hate to sound like a Commie, but the ruling class treat each other like good socialist
buddies. They don’t much let each other get in trouble. Back each other up. They don’t let each
other go broke. Continental Bank can’t go broke, but you can. Bankruptcy courts are filled with
folks… so they seem to have… there’s kind of a socialism there. It’s almost a Brotherhood.
Brotherhood is not really a sexist word, because it’s the right word. It’s descriptive. It’s kind of a
brotherhood. Well, a whole civil society in which people aided one another in that way would be
great if voluntary. This was of course going to be one of Reagan’s ideas… a great thing. We’ll
have everybody do it with a telethon, or something. I always use telethons as a kind of a joke,
you know… Poor people? Have a telethon. I mean, it’s a Hollywood solution.
Okay now, to a third… Actually, I haven’t discussed in detail Marx’s theory of freedom, but it
grows… Or his view of freedom, because he doesn’t really… he’s not a philosopher, he doesn’t
really have a view of it. He has a critique of the other view. Of the negative one. Hegel has a fuller
view, and I am going to mention his very quickly.
For Hegel, freedom is more like a placeholder word. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.
For Hegel, freedom is so important that it is the meaning and the point of human history in
general. That if one asks about the bible: “Quickly, what’s it about?”, someone will go “The devil
did it”, right? And that’s a quick account of the plot. Then if you ask Hegel quickly about history,
Hegel will go: “It’s about how freedom wins”.
Hegel’s account of freedom is more sophisticated in a way than any I have given you up until
now, because it is deeply historical. Here’s what I mean by that. In any given historical epoch,
Hegel says: “Show me the obstacles that Human beings saw in their path to realising their
concrete goals and the overcoming of those obstacles will receive the name Freedom”.
Now, the nice thing about that concept of freedom is it is a free concept of it, which means it
allows each generation to pursue freedom’s goals, maybe reformulating them anew. All I have
done is backtrack to the 19th Century, contrast positive and negative freedom… tried to do that.
But the Hegelian concept is historical and reminds us that when we formulate these goals… you
know, they are the work of each new group that comes along in the struggle for freedom.
For Hegel, freedom isn’t either external or internal or positive or negative. Freedom is not
something which people have, to quote Alasdair MacIntyre on Hegel’s view of freedom: “It’s not
something that people have. It is what they are”. When they don’t have it, they aren’t. And that
doesn’t mean they disappear, it means they are not human without it.
And so, in Hegel, I think that for many satisfying reasons – and that’s why I am doing it here
today – there are many satisfying reasons to bring the official history of ethics to a close with
Hegel. In other words, Hegel’s view is kind of like the last trump. It says: you give me the best
moral views that go out of your community, the limitations they face, wherever you happen to be
and whenever they are, and the struggle to overcome those things, with those goals, that’s
freedom. And I think that will give us… I agree with MacIntyre, that gives us the most satisfying
view because it’s the most historical, and it also reminds us that there is no eternal idea of
freedom, but only the struggle for freedom. Which is consistent with Martin Luther King’s
remarks, because while he made remarks about freedom, the struggle for his kinds of freedoms
and other people’s struggles as well. Rosa Parks, among others. Where struggles for certain
direct freedoms that were the overcoming of concrete limitations of a given time and place.
So the challenge of freedom will be to find the new boundaries, and how to break them down.
That is what freedom will be about. Well, it’s a scary concept of freedom, because it’s been
glossed in the following way by Engels, who quotes Goethe’s “Faust” and says that: “The principle
of freedom here is that all that exists deserves to perish”. Which as you know is
what Mephistopheles says in Faust. But it’s meant in a kind of funny way, in other words: “All that
exists has not yet lived up to freedom, so it deserves to change, to perish, to give way to
something more free”. So there is a little bit of sympathy for the devil in Hegel’s account, and I
don’t mind that being the case.
While it would be satisfying to end with Hegel’s account of freedom, I must say that starting
tomorrow I am going to switch the course of these accounts of human conduct. Because now I
have brought you up to the 19th Century following various models of human conduct until we
got to that most peculiar kind of human conduct, the struggle to be free. Which obviously I have
placed a very high value on. Now why did I do that? Because, for me, it trumps the others.
Whatever your project; to build a character of a certain kind, to be virtuous in a certain way, or to
act in a certain way, you can’t do it if you are not free. In that sense, freedom is the trump card in
social and political life. In other words, in everything that you want to pursue, of all these various
ways and modes of living I have discussed today, freedom is an enabling thing to do it. I mean, it
will either enable or block you, whether you are free to do it.
You may be forced to act as though you are free, but to really get there you have to really
overcome obstacles. That’s the concrete part of it. It’s why it is very important to remember that.
And so actually with today’s lecture, in a way, the sort of official philosophy part ends with Hegel
and we will move on to a transition from philosophy proper – where we discuss, you know,
ethical theories – to a discussion of human beings as they find themselves in societies, political
institutions, homes, clubs, families, and bars. In other words, folks and how they are going to get
by. We need to understand that that kind of account is not mundane or beneath the level of
academics or theory. It’s very important. As I say, it is the condition for the possibility of higher
orders of talk.
All they represent – the university system – all it represents in this regard is a very high level
development of the intellectual division of labour until it is divided into such small segments that
only eight people can talk to eight other people. So, to sort of drop beneath that level is not to
drop into something mundane and uninteresting, but is to get down where very interesting
things happen. I mean with Hegel, I agree that the most extraordinary thing… Tomorrow, as we
start discussing the really deviant philosophers… However, I would like to end with a note from
Marx, and just a little note for where we are going. All of the things I have offered today come
under the heading of interpretations of human conduct as they have been developed historically.
Now I have given rejoinders about the limitations of the account I have given. In other words it’s
hemmed in by certain things that I think will be clearer tomorrow.
But to quote the 11th thesis on Feuerbach by Marx, a very important point to remember – and
especially as a philosopher – is that the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways. The point however is to change it. It’s very interesting to interpret freedom in various ways,
but that’s not the point. The point is to actually walk another step down freedom’s highway, so
your kids can walk another step down it. If we are still bothering to have them. Given… you
know… certain other scenarios about the future. Blade Runner for example. Might decide not to
have kids, don’t want them to be cyborgs… I mean, you know… there are reasons people might
not have children today.
But no, the point is that now we are going to look at a different kind of philosopher. The ones we
will discuss tomorrow will include Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and a little bit of Kierkegaard too,
thrown in. And we are going to discuss these people because they begin to question the desire
and the drive that was sort of behind philosophy in the first place. So in a certain sense, to the
degree they discuss philosophy at all, it’s as meta-philosophers. In other words, they look at
philosophy in the way I do. As one cultural institution among others. You know, I mean it’s not a
master science of what the world really means. Because there isn’t one. Neither is religion. There
is no master discourse like that. If anyone has one, you’ve got a lot better product to sell than
anyone I know. Go meet Shirley MacLaine, make five billion dollars in California.
That isn’t… You don’t come to philosophy – especially today – in this sort of post-philosophical
atmosphere. Not for consolation. Not a good place to come for consolation. The older religions
are for that. It’s not a good place, around some just loon like me, to come in order to have
your… the things you believe… justified. Unless you have real strange beliefs. And it’s also sort
of a warning that it’s dangerous to believe – especially from someone that will present the
picture I will tomorrow – what I say. More important that you critically examine what you think. I
mean that’s the point. At least I hope it will be the point. Because, you know, sometimes I don’t
even care what I say. That must be wrong. Didn’t think about it long enough. So, it always makes
me uncomfortable when seeing anyone taking notes… because I don’t! I don’t think that what I
say is that important. So remember to be critical. If I am up here saying: “Criticise Authority!”, a
real bad feeling is the Monty Python joke, right? “Criticise Authority”. [crowd laughter]

Hegel and Modern Life (1990)


Transcript: Okay. In our last lecture, I ended the history of ethics in a way – what would be a
usual introduction to an ethics course – by discussing Hegel’s view of ethics with its… what one
might call it… “super concept” of freedom. The very large concept of freedom as formulating
those goals and desires of individuals in whatever given historical period. And the idea that
freedom represents is to see those goals and obstacles and their overcoming in that period, and
to name that activity and those sets of practices “freedom”.
Now, that side of Hegel’s philosophy… and Hegel is perhaps the most important philosopher in
the 19th Century. Because the people that I will talk about today – at least the first two or three –
react against Hegel. So Hegel’s view is very important. But the Hegel I gave you the other day is a
very radical Hegel, where freedom is the central notion. But there is another side to Hegel, as
many of you may have suspected if you have looked at articles like Fukuyama’s “The End of
History“, something like that.
There is another side of Hegel, a more conservative side that argues that while his view remains
historical, that history as it were, the context within which all activities, truth and so on gets its
meaning and in which human beings become what he calls “spirit”… The conservative Hegel –
that reading of Hegel – he argues that the culmination of this long historical process is
something like the Prussian State, or on an updated reading like Fukiyama’s – and this is one I
think perfectly fits what George Bush means by the “New World Order” – it means that history
proper is at an end. This is a very strange notion because we still, I think, to some extent think
historically.
History proper is at an end, because the human race has found the right ideas. Namely, Liberal
Democracy. By which we mean the televised pseudo state, to try to speak… and VCRs. Once you
have an economy that produces VCRs and stuff, and a pseudo state that gives you the
satisfaction of lording it over the rest of the planet… with a social system that doesn’t work…
history has reached its end and there are no more battles over big ideas. That’s the point. That
as long as the Cold War was going on, there were ideologies and battles between them.
Socialism, capitalism and so on…
Well, with the end of the cold war… this is the updated version of Hegel’s argument. Well, that’s
interesting already because it needed to be updated. See, since Hegel thought it was over in the
19th Century, this more recent article argues that history ended in the 20th Century only to have
the Gulf War come along. And if there is one sure sign in Hegel’s philosophy that history isn’t
over, of course it’s a war. Because there are embodied people in struggle with different views
about what freedom is and how to live. So now there will have to be another update about it
being over. So I am very sceptical about that claim, and also the Conservative Hegel for other
reasons would not be my favourite.
In any case, reacting to the philosophy of Hegel were a whole set of intellectuals, and he has an
ambiguous legacy. There were right wing Hegelians and left wing Hegelians. In fact one of the
origins of right wing, left wing was not simply where people sat in a French theatre, although
that’s another origin of the word. One has to do with these two schools of readings of Hegel.
The right wing Hegelians took Hegel to be fundamentally right, and their only task was to apply
his method of investigation to subject after subject. In other words, you know, just investigate
the Prussian State, spell out explicitly what he hadn’t quite said enough of… I’ve said enough
about [that].
The other school of Hegelians were the left wing Hegelians. One of whom later became very
famous and he will be the first person I will discuss today as we move beyond what I consider to
be rather narrow ethical concerns. While the problems we discussed in the last few lectures I
consider important, they are much narrower concerns than the best kind of social arrangements
within which human beings can realise their character and so on. And those lead to a whole
larger set of issues, so those are the ones we will discuss today. Those are the ones that were
raised by Hegel under the word “freedom”, and as I say, the most famous left wing Hegelian to
take up the challenge of giving a richer concept of freedom, I have already mentioned was Karl
Marx.
Marx’s name of course is not used much anymore. You know, this is supposed to be what
happened in the last fifteen years, is that definitively his view of the world has been refuted and
so on. And I would like to warn against these relatively premature judgements, especially in the
long scope of history. After all, Communism as an ideology… In the Soviet Union, the first
communist state, began in 1917 and it is hardly a long historical run to go from 1917 to 1989,
and to win hearts and minds in two thirds of the world and then be over like that.
That is the kind of historical view a culture might have if that culture’s view of history was based
on a miniseries. Because then you could go “Well, that was kind of like a miniseries in this longer
story”. But as a matter of just historical fact, the text of Marx is a classic text. William
Bennett agrees it’s a classic. It’s in the Great Books. So there you go, it’s a classic, okay. No more
argument needed, right? Bennet, you know, Bush’s man says it’s a classic, so it’s a classic.
And then in the historical sense, it’s still an ambiguous legacy. Because throughout the history of
Marxism, based on this Hegelian mode of thought in which concepts change as people change,
there was an ongoing criticism – which as we know today in Eastern Europe has led to the
overthrow of certain governments – an ongoing criticism within the communist states of
communism. That didn’t appear obvious to us over here until these dramatic events, as though
they hadn’t been prepared for by a long historical process of criticism. Of course, we were
blinded to that on our side of the border for Orwellian reasons. For strictly Orwellian reasons.
But now we see, by this period of history, we see that there were quite important social
movements. Movements that do deserve the name “democratic” movements, in a way that very
few movements in this country deserve the name. I mean a movement that serious – and for
democracy in the United States – would have to be either associated with dangerous African
Americans, with strange ideas that have made bizarre off the record remarks or something, or
else in some other way “ghettoised”.
Real movements for Democracy are oddly enough most threatening in nominal democracies.
That’s a principle of Hegelian discourse. In other words, if you live by an ideology, the most
dangerous ideology to you is your own, because someone may expect you to do what you say.
So, in that sense Communist ideology – as many of you know – was never a real threat in the
United States, right. Very few Communists got elected to Senate and so on. It’s just not really
popular.
On the other hand, our own ideologies of Democracy, Freedom, and Equality have been a great
danger to our own society. So that’s a dialectical truth and [that] leads me into Marx and Marx’s
criticism of capitalism. Because there’s a wide misunderstanding and I need to explain why a
criticism of Capitalism is a criticism of Hegel.
Because for Hegel, if (that was) the highest expression of humanity was this advent of Capitalism,
the liberal democratic state and so on, then a criticism of that State – you know, which had been
based on the previous French Revolution and so on – would be a criticism not just of Hegel, but
of the state of affairs his philosophy represented.
And that was Marx’s real point, not just merely to interpret Hegel or criticise him, but use him as
a vehicle to criticise the actual State… in terms of the degree of which… at first, it’s an internal
criticism. It’s a criticism of the gap between the promises of the bourgeois State and its practices.
And that criticism is launched in terms of the economy. The argument is rather elegant and
rather simple. And I mean, Marx has many complicated arguments. I am going to stick to a few
from this book: “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” by Marx. And it’s an
inexpensive little book.
The problem is… that the democratic state is – and Marx uses a rather strong word here –
in contradiction with the imperatives of the Capitalist economy. Now, I am not sure many people
would even want to disagree with that any more. I think that we are used to living in a sort of
televised environment in which contradictions don’t bother us… as much as they used to. They
just make us twinge.
In other words, we’ll see a huge picture of rubble on TV and a spokesman will be saying “There
was no rubble”… and the rubble is behind him, and we are used to that now. You know, we have
lived through periods where Richard Nixon would come on TV and say “I am not a liar” and his
eyes would drift off, you know… [crowd laughter]
So, we are more used to contradiction than they were, and take it less seriously. We expect it. In
fact certain cultural artefacts of our period, like Twin Peaks make a joke out of our ability to
accept contradiction. They use it, in a way, as a kind of an irony on our society, that we could
accept it with very little difficulty. But this wasn’t true in this period, so it was an important
criticism if Marx could show that the imperatives of the economy to accumulate human labour,
which for Marx was the key to capital. Not accumulating money. Because money was just a
medium, right, that was used to accumulate living labour.
That’s what is the fundamental meaning of the alienation of labour for Marx. To put it in really
basic terms, it’s this: the secret to capitalism is moving from a society – and this is why it has
ethical implications that I would like to draw – moving from a society where the question is “What
are you?”, to a society in which the question is “What do you own, or have?”, “What do you do, in
the sense of a career, or job, whatever?”.
Once human beings are re-described in that way, they are re-described in terms of their work
time. Which is not voluntary. I mean, you know, Reagan recognises that, right? He distinguishes
voluntarism from work – he’s that smart – and we all know when we are at work, we are not
volunteering. And one way you can know – no matter how much you love your job… everybody
always tells me “I love my job” – that very few people, when they are given two months off at full
pay decide to come in every day and work their butt off. It’s just… we… Americans may love their
jobs, but they may also have deep psychological reasons to believe that compensatory thing,
namely that they do really love it. They may in fact be devious in some respect that’s deeper than
our conscious one, which we will discuss when we get to Freud.
So for Marx the crime, as it were, that capital commits, and it’s not… I shouldn’t even use the
word “crime”, because it’s purely systemic and it has dual effects, one of which is incredibly
positive. The negative effect it has is to reduce the rich amount of human needs to needs that
can simply be bought and sold on a marketplace. In other words, to make us understand our
needs in terms of marketable needs. And this is almost a boring lecture now, because our need
for love, compassion, understanding, for social relations and so many other needs now are all
merchandisable.
I mean, even if you… one of the kinkiest things people used to do was just have intimate sexual
conversations with one another. Now that’s telephonised, and you put it on your VISA, right? I
mean, just think of that one example about telephone sex. This is how far Capitalism can go in
rationalising what at one time was a very intimate personal exchange, without the mediation of
money, into one that becomes marketable. So if you are watching “USA” on television late at
night, which I sometimes do, it’s got all those stupid B movies on it. Then here come on a whole
stream of lovely young men and women saying “Call me up”, five dollars a minute. So if you are
lonely, sad, tired, want a friend… there’s one on the market.
That’s the way in which Marx saw relations, as it were, between things. Because commodities are
things, even when it’s us. You know, if you are in a room full of people who sell insurance, and
you are trying to hire one of them, and you’re the executive, you’re choosing between
commodities. Now, someone will immediately object, of course one of the people there may have
a better personality… great! That means that that’s a feature of that commodity that’s attractive
to you as a buyer. That’s why the person may get the job.
So, for Marx, that was the violence it committed. [It] was [that] it not only commodified our
relations but our lives, and put the pursuit of things in the place of a whole host of other needs,
desires… in fact, the desire just for social relations themselves, which today is a real desire. Just
the desire for a genuine social relation or two. One or two genuine social relations.
So, now that was the bad part, on the social relations side for Marx. That’s where Capitalism was
at loggerheads with the great ideals of freedom and so on, is because such human beings under
such an economic system, because of competition with one another for what jobs were available
in order to survive within such an economy, where working could only be called “free labour” as a
kind of a joke. In other words, whether we work or not, whether we make that as a choice is sort
of a joke, right.
“Well I can choose not to work”. Well, the streets last night as this city froze were full of people
who, I am sure many didn’t choose not to work, right. I doubt that a lot of them are lazy.
Like Jesse Jackson, I don’t think that’s the problem with poor people, is that they are lazy. But in
any case, if you choose not to work, you may very well find yourself under a bridge at night. One
way you can find out, by the way, and this is simple to cut through a lot of the crap you usually
hear about class analysis and “there are no classes in America”. Here’s a little empirical test for
the audience to try.
Don’t work for eight years. Stop working. And if really bad things happen to you, you were in the
working class. If at the end of the eight years everything is fine and dandy, you still got a house
and a car and a nice place to live and a lot of nice friends, then you were okay. Otherwise you
were in the working class. But if you stop working for that long and you are in deep trouble, you
were a worker and didn’t know it. That’s a nice empirical test, and I challenge any of you to try it.
Someone who denies that there are classes can always give this one a shot, it’s a way to find out
if there are… really find out.
So those are some of the downsides. Classes are produced with unequal power. Social relations
become as it were reified, frozen. Phoney, if you will. The upside is… the upside that… where
Marx, I think, praises Capitalism in terms beyond those ever used by William Buckley, as a system
that had produced from nature more wonders, more technological wonders than the whole
previous history of the world had seen. In other words, the good things Capitalism did was to
build railways, medicines and even more importantly: new needs.
See, many of you may think that all of this, sort of, negative talk is kind of all left wing, all
whining after Bush, and we shouldn’t whine like that. We should be really happy about it, you
know. A thousand points of light, that vision thing. But the upside of this is that new needs get
produced. And for Marx that was a revolutionary process because the system would never – as
productive as it is – there would be no way it could ever catch up to the level of needs produced
by it. Have you ever noticed that?
Now, think about… Here is another example to think about, please. Remember how good stereo
sounded when you first got it instead of mono? You know, mono just played one… sort of flat
music… Mono sounded okay when you first got it, because it was better than that scratchy thing
that went like this… and you got your first stereo and it was so exciting, and nobody even
mentioned that the tapes you played on your stereo had a little hiss in them. But now to just put
a tape in something, you hear that hiss… and you think about your friends who have a CD, and
they don’t have that hiss. So there’s a new need now for hissless music. [crowd laughter]. All
around music, a whole new need…
Now apologists for the system want to say “Well that need… you know, we didn’t create that
need”. Well that seems highly dubious. Think of commodities like the hula hoop. Does anyone
remember the great hula hoop movement in the United States? Where people went around
demanding hula hoops? And then the capitalists went: “We’ll make them for you”. [crowd
laughter]. Well, no, that movement didn’t occur, see. I mean, there was no social movement
called the Hula Hoop movement… and went around: “Hula hoops or death! Hula hoops or death!”,
no some jackleg went: “You know, I bet you if we make these things like this, put out a few
records, people will be sweet”. And the next thing you know, people needed them.
And you just have to be nostalgic not to say they needed them. I mean, I heard someone the
other day in the video store, went: “I need this VCR!”, and it was just as dramatic a statement for
that person as someone in one of the third world countries that we plunder saying “I need rice!”. I
mean, it’s a new need. So Capitalism’s upside is it creates vast new technological abilities which
extend the power of the human species. Extend it until we can like, you know, go to the moon,
build a CD that doesn’t hiss and so on. That’s the upside of the system. Now, the problem Marx
saw was that those two imperatives can come into contradiction. The imperative on the one hand
of the economy, which now I am going to state in it’s blunt Wall Street form. Which is to make a
profit, which you do by accumulating labour, capital, goods, land and so on. That imperative to
create a profit versus the imperative to fulfil all these new needs. So for example…
And this is another classic example. Solar energy. Which is technologically available. And so it
comes in conflict with the imperative however for profit. In other words, there are ways to make
it. And when you hear these words you know they have a contradiction of the kind Marx
discussed. When you hear the words “We have the technology but it’s not cost effective”, that
phrase means “We have the social forces of production to build it, but it is not consistent with
our social relations based on profit. That’s all not being cost effective means. It doesn’t mean the
technology isn’t better, won’t meet more needs, won’t be safer, won’t be better for the
environment. It just quite simply means that you have a contradiction between social relations
that have these needs and the way that they are controlled by an economy that wants profit.
And solar energy is only one among many similar examples. You know, there are all of these,
sort of, old truck driver stories about the ball bearings they use at NASA, you know. I don’t know
if any of those are true. You always hear these sort of stories “Well, at NASA they have ball
bearings that are practically frictionless, if we had them in our cars we’d get seven thousand
miles a gallon”. Well, I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be. Because clearly our technology…
we can get to the moon, we could build a better ball bearing that would like triple gas mileage.
That seems fairly clear, that that’s within the capability of our technology. And much else
besides, that won’t be pursued because it’s in contradiction with these economic imperatives.
Now what does this all have to do with the kinds of lives people lead, and morality? Well,
everything. Because, as I tried to argue throughout the course, you give one society, sort of,
Greek Tragedy, the theatre, and so on… and Greek ideals as a sort of model for how they live and
you get one kind of human being. Renaissance arts, you get another kind of human being with
other human projects. Then you get the Brady Bunch and you get another kind of human being,
and another set of projects.
Now, the vicious way to describe that situation is “ideology“, but it’s an empty term. It simply
means that if you want to know how someone thinks, look at how they dress, who they hang out
with, where they live, right? The kinds of folks they went to school with, sorta how big is their
bank account, and you’ll pretty much know where they are coming from. Which is the banal West
Texas way of stating Marx’s theory of ideology, and it’s right! It’s true, you pretty much do! And
it’s not a rigid theory, it’s not like you’re never surprised, but you are rarely surprised. It’s the
best rough generalisation about social relations that I know of. And it’s supposed to remind us
that moral dilemmas of the kind that I discussed last time, which now I am going to distance
myself from by calling them merely philosophical dilemmas, have to be understood – and this is
the point I want to draw from Marx today – in terms of being different for different classes.
In other words, depending on what social situation you come out of, a moral dilemma may be
quite different. The moral dilemma about whether to steal, you know, an extra 25,000 on your
tax return is a different kind of moral dilemma than the moral dilemma about whether you are
going to rob a 7-Eleven to have enough food for the next month. And you would have to be a
moral imbecile not to see that there are important differences, right, between those decisions.
They may both be decisions concerning theft, but there are important moral differences based on
those decisions, simply by virtue of something that to us today seems I think slightly unfair:
circumstance. I mean, in our country it’s really horrible to say this, but to call someone poor is
not an insult. You haven’t said anything about them. You have talked about their circumstances.
There’s a wonderful line in a play by Tennessee Williams where Deborah Kerr and her old father
who is the poet – the play is “Night of the Iguana“, I think some of you may have seen it – she and
he father come up, and they go “Yes, we are poor” “Well, you say it as though you are proud of it”
She goes “I am neither proud nor ashamed, it’s not what we are, it’s just what has happened to
us”. It’s really a hard way to think in our country, because one way we allow ourselves…
And now I am going to stray from Marx for a moment, because I just use his text. I have not… I
don’t really care if it’s “right”. Because I think that to the extent we get something out of books,
what we want to get out of them is something that we can use. And I haven’t found any books
where I could use all of it, or even most of it. That’s certainly true with this one too.
To stray from the text of Marx just a little bit, in our country one of the ways that we can stand to
have a society that is so opulent, and it’s impossible to drive into this city and to not feel it… into
Washington DC. And see the Pentagon and these amazing buildings and then just see the bridges
lined with people sleeping under it at night. How do we accept it? As people who think that we
are still human? How do we accept it? And begin even cynically to accept it? Well, part of the
reason for that – at least part of the reason – is that at some level we must believe – and now
back to this freedom thing again – that it was their own, sort of, choices that got them there. So
they are, sort of, in some sense to blame for being there.
Now, I’ll admit that no-one ever quite spells it out that clearly. But in political discourse in our
country the implication is fairly clear. The implication was there and we accepted it for years,
when Ronald Reagan used to hold up the want ads in front of TV: “Well, they don’t have to be
there, look…” You know, have you ever looked at the want ads, and what’s on it? You know.
There are like, fourteen jobs if you want to be in this dial-a-porn business, okay… there’s a job
for you. 28 or 9 jobs at McDonalds, for the rest of them you have to be able to read. That puts a
lot of people under bridges already, right… at night?
So, a notion of freedom and a society that becomes so callous to the minimal demands of what
Marx called “human requirements”… human requirements… it’s not utopian to demand human
requirements. That’s the standard objection any time you use the word “Marx” – so that’s why I
am sort of getting away from it there – “must be utopian”. No, it’s not utopian to demand that in
a world with this kind of technology, that as a moral demand, a society feed, clothe and house its
people. A society that doesn’t do it, with the kind of technology and the wealth we have is
beneath contempt and makes a mockery of all the previous history of civilisation.
And to the extent that that we are silent and among such brigands, we are brigands too. It’s
despicable. It’s disgusting. And we have lived with it, and it seems like it’s getting more support
every day. I don’t know. It looks like we are in a very dark time. Well, Marx is not exactly the
figure to illuminate that time, because he himself became, and his texts… the use of it in another
part of the world, like I have been, sort of, implying in my political remarks, just as some of the
great texts of Democracy; Jefferson and others, have been misused in this country in hideous
ways. I think it’s more than obvious now in Eastern Europe, in China, and in the Soviet Union,
that the forms of what I call “State Capitalism” over there had very little to do with the work of
Marx.
I had a student friend visit the Soviet Union, and the least visited place there… and this was back
in the Khrushchev period when they were not quite so, you know, stirred up. The least visited
place in the Soviet Union was the Marx-Lenin institute where all the books were. Nobody read all
that stuff. In fact a lot of the books had already been removed by Stalinists, the ones that would
really upset people. I mean the book here, the one I have discussed has the account of alienation
of labour. That wouldn’t go over very well in Stalin’s Russia. Because the fundamental insight
here is that if you are working your fanny off on a shop floor in Kiev, it’s hard to know how you
are in a worker’s paradise when someone in Detroit is working their fanny off there. The view
from the bottom up is the one that seems to me plausible. Under both conditions, something
important about your humanity is being lost… under both conditions.
And when we look at the conditions I am discussing today, we are not looking at abstract moral
conditions. I am not offering a grand abstract theory of them. I am trying to give something like a
rough account of the fabric of daily life… a rough account of it, because it’s too rich. Especially in
this country, once you get off the interstate, the fabric of daily life is very rich. Something like the
distinction I would want to make between a sort of theoretical approach, and an approach more
rooted in daily life to the issues that we will be discussing. I am just laying some of them out
now…
It’s the difference between driving cross country on the interstate – or flying over it – and then
occasionally taking the back roads. This is very interesting, driving through the South, but it’s
also interesting driving through the Midwest. Because the United States is not the kind of
country… you notice how after Hegel, we started giving a theory of the present and stuff? See,
that was what we promised we would do. It’s that philosophy at its best should be our time
comprehended in thought. That keeps it from being what Nietzsche says, sort of, “a museum of
ideas”… says, you know, “Which was built for loafers in the garden of knowledge”. I am pretty
sure that is right.
Well, for philosophy to be more than that sort of “museum of ideas built for loafers in the garden
of knowledge”, it needs to give an intransigent account of conditions in the present. Now, it
could be wrong, okay. I told you I was a fallibilist. What I am saying now could be wrong, but that
shouldn’t be decided by slogans or TV commercials, or by Willie Horton ads, but by debate. By
argument, among a public body, public citizens, you know, talking and arguing.
Now, the further problem – and this is a problem that Marx in part is implicated in – is the way in
which political discourse has, as it were, dried up and narrowed. The things about which we can
debate, the topics which are open for alternatives and for other explanations and descriptions.
And this is the deep sense in which I have used the words “pseudo-democracy” instead of
“democracy” throughout, because even in its Greek form where it was limited only to Greeks who
were citizens – not slaves and not foreigners – even there, the institutions of representation
where people can be recalled much quicker. See it’s harder to recall someone once they get into
this city. Not many come back “We didn’t like it”… and again, why not?
Well because in the current situation – as many events that have just happened, I think, indicate –
political power and economic power are deeply interlocked. It seems to me hardly accidental that
most of the people in the senate are millionaires. I think all but – what – one or two? They are all
millionaires. Is that just an accident? An accidental relation? Most of them white guys, notice
that? Accidental relation? No. See, that’s the kind of prima facie evidence one should look at. You
should go: “Well, that just looks like a bunch of white guys in some really rich club in New York”.
Well, it is like them! In fact, when they go to New York, it is them!
Now, that’s not a conspiracy theory, because all of them appear on your TV and tell you they are
running your lives. So it’s not a conspiracy. The deep insight Marx has – and it’s really an
important one – is that whatever… and by the way this is not a sufficient condition for what we
would like to call a “good” or “excellent” human life, but it’s a necessary condition – necessary,
but not sufficient – is that you not have your life reduced to total poverty. That’s this… In other
words, it’s not enough to just be free from constraints. You can’t be just reduced to penury and
then say that person has a free life.
And on the other hand, you can’t have your life reduced to work – no matter how high the wage –
and have it be a really excellent life. That reduction of life to work itself cripples life, and cripples
the challenge to become something else; larger, other. And it’s only in that sense that we’ve
started with these philosophical ideals. Because each one of them points the way at projects
other than – right? – other than simply being the person who sold the most tyres. Who pushed
the most papers through the largest office. Each one of them.
In that regard, let me refer back to a really old one. Alexander the Great on finding a sceptic in
the streets. A really famous philosopher. And this guy was really, just, totally otherworldly. All he
did is just think and lay in the streets, and he was really dirty. And some of Alexander the Great’s
officers… and by the way Alexander the Great did better than George Bush ever will. Conquered
the whole world, you know, and he was what? 26 or so, younger than Dan Quayle, probably just
as short. [crowd laughter]. And he sees this old philosopher lying in the streets and he said “Well
if I wasn’t Alexander, I would want to be that man”.
The reason is that they both had extreme and extremely interesting projects. It’s hard for us to
even have a sense for a project like that now. Because our projects have been reduced to a series
of bills, petty annoyances, and in our spare time, the search for what little meaning is left over
from all that busyness and chatter that goes into that process. Now this is not… I mean, I am
aiming at this audience, because we are here. So please do not get confused, I am not a foreign
agent. I don’t know a government in the world where I couldn’t say similar things and in most
governments… some, worse…
Now, I don’t want any complacency about my lecture or that to be viewed as me pulling back
from what I have said. Because it is no argument, and it never has been, to say “Our tribe is a
little better than everybody else’s, so that’s fine”. You know why that’s no argument, don’t you?
Well if you are among tribes of savages and you only lop off 20,000 heads a year as opposed to
19, that’s no lopping off heads argument. Even if you are the greatest tribe in the world. A claim
that we believe a priori true.
In any case, and now to try to summarise these, sort of, far ranging and sort of nasty anti-
republican polemics here or whatever… “left wing” talk. What I have been trying to fill out today
for you is a richer notion of freedom in which we recognise that before moral problems really
come up in the philosophical sense, before they really come up there are conditions for human
life that have to be fulfilled, which I call “necessary human requirements”. They are not sufficient
to live a good life, but they are necessary. Among them are; food, shelter, ordinary health care.
Real exciting, huh? See, that’s not as much fun as Kant, but they’re real important. Because
without that, it’s hard to follow the Categorical Imperative. You know, it’s easier to follow a ham
sandwich without that.
So that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for a good life. It’s also – and this is a more
radical claim – it’s also a necessary but not a sufficient condition that one have the freedom in
one’s life to pursue other goals than work, and in a strong sense. I am not talking now about
getting a hobby, but a life not reduced to work. Not reduced to work. A life where when you go
to a cocktail party and they go… they don’t go “What are you?”, they go “What do you do?”, and
you don’t have to answer with your job description. Which is another way of asking “Who are
you?” in a metaphysical sense, right? That accounts for a lot of the Phil Donahue shows. Women
show up and are embarrassed to go “I am a homeworker, I work at home”. Why would that be a
problem? Well in a capitalist economy, it’s a terrible problem, and here’s why. Because
housework is unwaged, and since we value labour by the wage it brings, it’s not surprising that
an old person in a rest home’s ability to tell a beautiful story is not valued, because it is not
waged.
You go into an old folk’s home… I mean, we ought to realise this… we will either be old or we
will face another alternative that’s unpleasant. You go to an old folk’s home, that’s unwaged
labour. Their whittling and their storytelling. It’s not valued in our culture, in our society. It’s not
waged. Housework, no matter how many kids you raise, it’s not really valued. Oh come on, they’ll
say something about you on the Today show if you live to be 100: “This woman lived to be 100,
had nine kids”. Then you get a little clap and that’s it. [crowd laughter]. Other than that, very
little social value.
All that unwaged labour. The reason it’s not valued is because it’s not waged. Donald Trump, you
know, he opens a hotel. Huge wage, huge value to his labour. Well what the hell did he do? Talk
to Merv Griffin in a room for three minutes. And that’s more valuable than some old man who
has lived 90 years worth of experience and can tell a story about his life in which you might find
a human meaning. A society that produces that situation is pathological. It neither has nor
deserves a very long existence.

Nietzsche: Knowledge and Belief (1990)


Transcript: Last time, in our last lecture, we were screaming about the United States government and its many
failings. I want to make clear something, and it’s… unfortunately in the current context… I must tell you that many of
you who came here to hear a course on “Philosophy and Human Values” probably expected more “Philosophy” and
less on the “Human Values” side. Well, I hope some of you were here yesterday when I ran through a series of ethical
theories, and I think I gave some arguments. That was my “professionalising” work. In other words, that was the
display of my rough credentials to do this.
Now, I am onto a topic of which I consider… and so far in a way, it’s just groundwork for the other stuff, because all
of the great ethical theories of the past in a way do contain utopian moments. In a way, being a Stoic, an Epicurean,
being someone who pursues Excellence, are all interesting and historically recoverable – in a certain sense – projects.
What I have pointed out today is that situation in which we find ourselves in – modern life, in the present – means that
there are other conditions that must be met to even pursue those projects. So, I don’t see the two sets of remarks as
different as you might think. It’s not as though I did philosophy one day and politics the next, because such watertight
distinctions are not viable between philosophy and politics.
And again, before I return to Marx, let me try to indicate that the priority of politics is marked even in the Greeks,
where the last thing that Aristotle wrote was a constitution for Athens. He wrote that, you know, last, after he had
written the Metaphysics, the Physics, the Logic and all this. I have a feeling that he thought that constitution as
important as anything he wrote.
We certainly know about Plato writing The Republic, that that remark about the best kind of state, and that debate in
Plato is certainly as important as anything he wrote. So, in a way, even the classic philosophers – the ones that the
people from the National Association of Scholars love – understand that politics, as it were, sets those boundary
conditions and those necessary conditions within which human beings can pursue things like a good life for
themselves.
And so, those are the conditions that I was discussing last time, and trying to discuss then in the context of the present.
And for that I have found Marx helpful in one respect. I want to point out something about that though. There is a
severe problem with the writings and the work of Marx that is all too obvious to us today. And that’s that the
assumption that workers shaping and forming their own modes of work wouldn’t fall victim to the power of the State,
which would now step in in place of a capitalist class, exploit their labour in the same way… not exactly in the same
way, you know, they’d use different words and all that. As I say, pretty much from the bottom it’s hard to tell the
difference. But, you know, they’d use a different ideology… but his expectation that the State would do more than
administer, and actually control the life of people, was an absolute blind spot in his work.
But then look at our Liberal theorists. For them an equal blind spot is that while they may pay lip service to wanting to
constrain the State, you know, and let free enterprise flourish – that led, when it was tried, and it hasn’t been tried in
a long time – when it was tried, it led to a great deep worldwide depression that scared the capitalist class so much that
no-one has ever tried it again since. And no-one plans to. President Reagan came into office promising to shrink the
size of the state. As you may know, as a matter of fact it is larger than ever.
So that the process of a world becoming bureaucratically more complex and intrusive at the level of the state is a
world phenomenon. It’s not localisable. The process of an economy becoming ever more diverse. Commodifying ever
more sections of our lives. Until we’ve replaced the “sunday stroll”, to use another example. I mean, I’m old enough
to remember that. When I’d go with my grandad, and we’d go for a stroll on Sunday. Well that can’t be done now
without a relation to the commodity. Well it could be, but rarely is. We are socialised to go for a stroll someplace else
on Sunday now. The mall is open in the afternoon. Even in North Carolina, after church, they open it up… after
church. You stroll through the mall. So that you can both stroll, and shop. Sort of, the strolling aspect is still
important. I mean I’m not saying it’s not kind of kinky to walk around and watch people buy things, you know. It’s
amusing.
So, I don’t want you to think that Marx has a critique of capitalism only, and that’s all I am interested in. The critique
of the state and the state bureaucracy is also important. And I have mentioned the name of Max Weber, but I didn’t
bring in any of his books. They are real thick, real boring, and I have suggested that a sense for what a modern
bureaucracy is like can be evoked from reading the novels of Franz Kafka.
Things like “Before the Law” and “The Trial” give you more of a sense of being caught in a modern bureaucracy.
And all of you have that sense anyway. If you’ve, you know, moved to a new city and tried to hook up a telephone,
and they say: “Go to room 238”. You go to room 238, and they say “Where did you come from? Who did you talk
to?”. You go “I forgot”. They go, “Oh no, you’ll have to go back to room 104”. You go to 104, 104 says “You’ve
been to 232? Well, you can’t come to room 104”. [crowd laughter]. And we all know this. And so for that go to… I
mean that’s what modern bureaucracies look and feel like, you know. So for that go to Kafka.
So, what I was trying to develop last time was a criticism of the State, and the economy. Of a new arising global
order… that now, I guess has become popular enough to deserve the moniker “New Order”. A new order. I am always
suspicious of new orders.
So now I am going to drop back a level and look at some of the other factors that go into the formation of human
values other than – although I still think these are crucially important – other than the economic ones. And for that
purpose, I just can’t restrain myself from looking at a couple more of the critics of Modernity. You might call it critics
of modern life, of the modern state, the modern economy, and of the conditions in which a modern culture is formed.
And one of those critics that I think has come under fire in Time magazine and elsewhere, is Nietzsche. You may have
heard of him: Nietzsche.
It’s very popular now to see Nietzsche as, sort of, the new threat. You know, in the sixties the right wing was worried
that too many college professors read Marx. They don’t worry about that anymore. [crowd laughter]. People like Jon
Elster run huge institutes. They’re analytic Marxists, that’s respectable. Now you are looked at, sort of, you know, just
a little funny if your interest is in Nietzsche. And I’ll try to explain first what’s supposed to be so scandalous about
Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is supposed to hold the scandalous view that knowledge is a form of power. Now that is scandalous because
knowledge is knowledge. It’s objective. You know, like journalism. [crowd laughter]. And it would be scandalous to
show that wherever we find knowledge, we will find it structured and constructed around a system (or systems) of
power. Won’t find one without the other.
Now, one can think of this along the simplest pedagogical models. By that I mean the classroom models. I mean, I
ought to know this from teaching the university. I know how to pass along knowledge.
To get someone to believe me in the last analysis, I give them an “A”, which I could replace with a “happy face”.
They are used to that, it’s from kindergarten. They are both just symbols, right, of achievement. They’re not getting
paid for this stuff, right. Just give them a little “A”, they smile. That same system starts in kindergarten: “happy
face”… “A”… runs through to “F”. “F”, no face… blank. The same thing would work in kindergarten. That form I
used looks fair. I mean, I am grading objectively. But the point is deeper. That what the knowledge is based on is my
spot of power as the teacher. That’s what it’s based on. Now, you would go: “oh no – it’s based on what’s really
true!”. Yeah, but… but… how does that get meted out and parsed out? Who decides that? Well the blunt and ugly
answer is: we do. The teachers do. We decide.
Now you are gonna… There are clear counter examples to Nietzsche’s argument. In mathematics at its simplest
levels, I will grant you, that if we are doing a mathematics course, I could grade objectively. But I will also grant you
that nothing of great importance to human values hangs on truths that everyone can accept. That two plus two is four,
that A is A… are all acceptable… and they are acceptable precisely because nothing of very great human importance
hangs on them. The moment you go a little beyond that in any direction, even in math class, when you discuss for
example the philosophy of mathematics, then the disputes start, and then power at some point has to insert itself and
decide.
So, an important part of Nietzsche’s investigation is in the interconnection between forms of knowledge and power.
Forms of – and for the purposes of our course – forms of ethical behaviour and power are the subject of his most
important book. Well, maybe not his most important, but certainly the one… that is the most coherent: “On the
Genealogy of Morals” by Nietzsche. And in this book – and I am going to talk about it just briefly – Nietzsche talks
about not what’s right and wrong in the way we did in previous lectures -good or bad actions – but the word
“genealogy” talks about what were the origins of the situations within which we make the value judgements. In other
words, from where did this distinction come. Good, bad, right, wrong, and so on?
Now Nietzsche’s argument is rather abrasive. It’s certainly provocative, and “The Genealogy of Morals” traces the
moral form of discourse – good, bad, right, wrong – back to originally – and again, remember this is 19th Century
Germans again – back to the Greeks. Now, here Nietzsche talks about the Greeks as having… and the word he uses is
very important, and this will move us finally back to our account of the present. Nietzsche talks about the translation
of “Virtue”. What was Virtue for the Greeks? Nietzsche was a philologist who could never get a normal job as a
professor, because he was a little nuts, okay. And anyway… that wouldn’t have stopped him now, but it stopped him
then. [crowd laughter].
For the Greeks, Virtue… when I said the word, I could see all of you go: “Oh, virtue…”. Yeah, it wasn’t like that for
the Greeks. I have already given you the Greek ideal of Odysseus, where Virtue included the ability to be a clever liar.
In other words, knowing when and who to con was important. That’s not part of the Victorian idea of virtue, but it’s
part of the Greek ideal of it. And so Virtue for them meant this “Excellence” in being well rounded. It meant to be
excellent at revenge, so that – unlike the Christian ideal of Virtue – if someone strikes you, you strike them back, and
the reason you do that is because if you don’t it will offend them worse. It will hurt their honour and yours. Much
more virtuous to hit them back, and then both your honours are intact. It will only humiliate them to turn your face, as
though they were unworthy scum. No, hit them back. So Nietzsche discusses this use of virtue, and the Greek
evaluation he calls “noble”.
Now, “noble” for Nietzsche is not itself a term of value, but a kind of descriptive term of the way the Greeks
evaluated. And he himself is not doing ethics the way I was doing it the other day. This is not it. He is giving, as it
were, a genealogy. A history of the way in which we have come to use these words. For Nietzsche the key movement
in the way the words “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong” occur, occur around the word “virtue”, and occur with the
Christian transformation of virtue. From something active, based on Excellence into something filled with what
Nietzsche calls “resentment“.
And I guess there is a simple way to make the argument – and I am trying to keep my remarks here at a level where
they are debatable – what he means is something like this. For the Greeks, you know, someone who was strong
enough to sin and went ahead and sinned. Which meant they did what they wanted to and enjoyed it. And for the
Greeks, that was good. The Christian idea of “virtue” which includes the idea of “guilt” and “sin” meant that you
wanted to do something real bad and you don’t. And they’re frustrated and filled with resentment towards those
sinners who go ahead and do what they want to do. And you turn the name of your fault – cowardice – into a virtue:
“virtue”. Really you just didn’t have the guts to go ahead and do what you wanted to do. [I am] trying to make it
sound even slimier than it is, but this is Nietzsche’s argument. In other words you didn’t have the strength to go ahead
and pursue what you really wanted. And so your name for that inability is your virtue: you didn’t do it [whispers]
because it’s wrong.
Well we know that doesn’t work out – frequently – because we have several notorious cases. The Jimmy
Swaggart case shows that the most virtuous sometimes fall. But it’s worse than that. As Nietzsche says this Christian
notion of virtue is a double trap. Because let’s suppose someone who has the strength to pursue excellence goes ahead
and does what what they want to do and finds satisfaction. Then because the whole field within which right and wrong
is understood in the Christian era is different than the whole field within which right and wrong is understood in an
earlier period, when you go ahead and do that, then you pay another price: guilt. That’s when you internally torment
yourself for the very paradoxical and perverse reason that you did what you wanted to do. You know, “Damn, I’m so
bad, I did what I wanted to do”. You don’t do what you want to do and you feel, as it were, helpless but a little bit
smug and then resentful towards others that do otherwise. That’s resentment. Or you go ahead and do it and then feel
guilty and have resentment towards yourself.
So Nietzsche talks about this reversal of values as a reversal of values from the Greek values, and the key word is
“virtue”. Virtue is very differently understood in the Victorian era, and this is what Nietzsche talks about in “The
Genealogy of Morals”. If… One of the things the argument does, whether you like it or not… or whether you accept it
or not, and I have only outlined it in kind of a snide, quick way here today. Whether you like it or not, the interesting
part of Nietzsche’s project is that what we could see… and I haven’t done that in here, but what we could have
presented as eternal problems of morality… in Nietzsche’s account we become very aware that these so called
“eternal” problems change radically depending on where you happen to be in history.
What gets called “good” is different if you happen to be in one society – or one historical period – and in another.
Now that seems like the shocking claim that “it’s all relative”, right? That’s where Nietzsche is supposed to be so
abominably bad for a real humanistic education. That it’s all relative. Well this has never… this is not a part of the
argument. What Nietzsche is trying to show is that knowledge, truth, objectivity and good and bad have conditions for
possibility. And those conditions for possibility change. That doesn’t destroy what seems to be someone who lives in
the Victorian period’s right to call someone a sinner. In fact it’s a condition for the possibility of them doing it. You
see what I mean. It’s not that everything is relative. It’s that there are conditions within which evaluations take place
that themselves require analysis. In other words his account is not a moral theory, but it is a theory about how we have
come to have the moral theories we do have… how we have come to have the ones that we do have.
Freud paid a tremendous compliment to Nietzsche. Freud said that Nietzsche knew more about himself than any other
human had ever known or was ever likely to know. Fairly smart guy I guess. Nietzsche was very bright. His main
target was Christianity, and I am going to… now we are going to return to a more contemporary critique of
Christianity. And I want… In this lecture I am going to present a little bit of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. And
the reason I am going to do it and how it’s connected with my earlier remarks is to this very day, in spite of the so
called secularisation of the world… values and especially in the United States… in our culture – and again we are
working for a theory of the present – are still by and large Christian… by and large Christian values. Those are the
official public ones, right. The official public values. Again, the gap between how they are practiced and what they are
is all a matter of dispute.
But this… Growing out of the discourse of Hegel there are other critiques, as I say, and Nietzsche’s is one. He focuses
on the values that surround Christianity. So I am going to a talk about him a little bit more now, and then in the next
lecture I want to talk about a Christian who has a criticism of modern Christianity. So you’ll get both sides. You’ll get
one guy, who sort of, you’ll know before I am though here thinks Christianity was a… mistake. From the standpoint
of the species it was a mistake. He goes… well not quite, you know, a two thousand year mistake? I mean, it was
more than that. It was a little bit more catastrophic.
Nietzsche thinks that among the other ill effects of Christianity, one of them is very banal. It’s the habit of bad
reading. He explains how many of use are raised in churches where when we bother to read – now this won’t hold for
many of our Jewish friends, or people who believe other religions – but in the Christian tradition we are taught to read
the Old Testament where every stick of wood, every stone, every snake, every bird, every bat is a sign of Jesus. And
Nietzsche points out that this inculcates in us habits of bad reading. It does. You know if you think about it, he [a
preacher] says, “Well, you know in that book there…” then the preacher reads some just unintelligible piece of the
Old Testament, you know, “The locusts have no king… and that means Jesus is coming”, and you go “Hmm, yeah,
okay”. Nietzsche says this makes you not read well. [crowd laughter]
Being brought up this way tends to make you not read well. It’s worse than that however, and that’s that what… the
way Christianity presents itself is a doctrine of love and compassion. Certainly that has something to do with its
appeal to our national character. And that’s good, to adopt a doctrine of love and compassion. Nietzsche’s concern in
this book “On the Genealogy of Morals” is to show that what’s beneath that mask of love and compassion is really a
doctrine of resentment and hatred. And I think I can make that come alive for you with some pretty banal examples.
One would be Jerry Falwell, who discussed homosexuals. He loves them. How many people believe he really loves
them? See I don’t. I think he hates them. His way of hating them is to love them. That’s the trick Nietzsche was after.
The trick about how resentment, envy and hatred can be masked with these words: love and compassion. It’s an
important argument today because I think we have become a suspicious culture. Nietzsche has been called one of the
masters of suspicion. Paul Ricouer – the philosopher – called him a “master of suspicion”. Ricouer is a Christian as
well, he just thinks that reading these books is the mediation through which any modern kind of faith would have to
pass. You’d have to read them, understand them before you’d know what you meant by having faith.
In any case Nietzsche sees this dynamic of resentment and envy as being, as it were, the unspoken, or the code
beneath the code of Christianity. And so for the first time in the course I am going to pull out a section of a book that I
want to look at, if I can find the correct quote here. This is from “On the Genealogy of Morals”. In this edition it is on
page 48, it’s section 15 of the first essay. Nietzsche is discussing Christian love, as it were, and faith, and hope.
Nietzsche in his rather cynical way says “In faith in what? In love of what? In hope of what? These weak people,
some day or other they too intend to be strong”. Have you ever heard an evangelist and got that feeling? That while
they were real meek, some day they intended to be real strong? That’s kind of… That’s the idea.
“There is no doubt of that because they say their kingdom is coming. They term it ‘The Kingdom of God’ because
after all, one should be so humble in all things. To experience that kind of duplicity one needs to live a long time.
Dante, I think committed a crude blunder, when with a terror inspiring ingenuity he placed at the gateway of his hell
the inscription ‘I too was created by eternal love’. At any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the
gateway to the Christian paradise and its eternal bliss the inscription ‘I too was created by eternal hate’, provided a
truth could be written above the gateway to a lie. What constitutes the bliss of this paradise?”
Well Nietzsche goes on to quote, not Jerry Falwell but Saint Thomas Aquinas. Great teacher, saint, certainly knew
more about Christianity than I do, or most of us. Thomas Aquinas says that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven
will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them”. At that moment in
Nietzsche’s text, something, sort of, creepy should come up on your back. You should go “Saint Thomas Aquinas said
that in heaven, our chief bliss would be that we could see all those mean people that got us while we were alive.
Having all of that stuff ripped off of them, eternally, forever”. And Nietzsche’s text wants to bring alive for us the
barbarism, the hatred that must be buried in such a doctrine of love as its core.
It’s a very frightening argument, but it isn’t limited – and I don’t want to limit it – to a set of Christian values
specifically, but to certain duplicitous ways in which words of value are used in general. The way that a bomb can be
dropped lovingly, surgically. See, when you cut someone in surgery you do it to heal them, right? That’s what a
surgical strike is. That’s what a surgeon does, cuts the cancer out, leaves the patient alive. So… but that’s not all a
surgical strike is, you see. This field within which good and bad appear so clearly to us – or is supposed to, I think
some of us may be getting a little confused, but… – in which values are supposed to be so clearly… appear to us…
may very well have these duplicities built within them.
A surgical strike may not be like surgery with Dr Kildare. It could turn out there could be some resentment and hatred
beneath it. There might be, it’s possible. Nietzsche is not trying to argue demonstratively, or to prove a syllogism, but
rather to raise suspicions. To raise the kinds of suspicions that, as I say, I think many of us have when we look at the
content of the values that have come up to us, you know, through our traditions. That’s what Nietzsche is powerfully
and importantly good for. Not to deny – again, not to say “All is relative” – but to try to remind us of something of the
origins of what we call “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” and so on.
By the way, these values have come out in other contexts. I remember in an earlier war General Westmoreland saying
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. But it was not an irony. He meant it. I mean, so did the early
Christian communities that settled into this country mean it. That for a witches own good one had to dunk her
repeatedly in water. Now we have come a long way since then haven’t we, because now we lock people away in
prisons and in institutions, torment them with drugs, lock them up in the most dangerous environments, have more
people in prison in this country per capita than any country in the world except South Africa. I don’t know, they may
be… the new South Africa may be ahead of us, who knows. But we haven’t gotten as far ahead in this regard as we
think, and this argument has been updated by people like Michel Foucault.
We still have… The idea that we would send someone to prison in order to rehabilitate them, now we are getting to be
a little more honest about that. We are getting a little bit more barbaric, and for Nietzsche that would be better. That
would be a little more honest. We are sending them to prison because we are scared of them and that we know if they
go there really bad things will happen to them and it will ruin their lives and that will make us happy. That’s what we
should say when we send one to prison – according to Nietzsche – if had to be honest. As Nietzsche said “In the name
of minimal honesty”, don’t send them to prison and go “Oh, that was the best thing for them”. You know, you were
spanked by your father, maybe once, and he just beat the hell out of you and he went, “That hurt me worse than it did
you”, and you go “I guess…” [crowd laughter]
Reading the text of Nietzsche makes us suspicious of people who do things for our own good. It makes us suspicious
of people who “love” us – you know – in a kind of abstract way, especially. So I didn’t want you to think that I had
sort of – with my previous lecture – sort of become soft hearted. So that’s why we followed up with the Nietzsche
lectures [crowd laughter]. We don’t want any conservatives saying “Well, you are not tough minded enough”. So this
is, sort of, a little bit more of the tough minded part.
Just… a, sort of, a Christian doctrine of loving everyone, Nietzsche says does not work. Because love is meaningless
without discrimination. In other words, in what way do I honour you, to love you, if I love everybody else too? See
that’s… there are many points like that in Nietzsche that I think are quite challenging and quite interesting. It is
absolutely, for Nietzsche, duplicitous to go “I just love everyone”. Well, you haven’t met everyone. [crowd laughter].
And some of them you are not going to like. [crowd laughter]. Because they are asses, and you are not going to like
them. And if you did, the people you really loved ought to be irritated, because you’d say “Well, I thought you loved
me, you love everybody? Well, big deal, I’ll see you later. I mean, you know, you bump into me again, you’ll still
love me.”. You know, it’s like Will Rogers “I never met a man I didn’t like”, well he never met George Bush. [crowd
laughter]. You know.
So Nietzsche is a wonderful… and all I can do is… because his argument is intricate and powerful, I am just giving
you suggestive bits of it today. But Nietzsche is one of the modern masters of suspicion, whose… the reading of
whose books… I think warns us against some of our, as it were, not prejudices, because it’s not fair to call something
a prejudice that’s so deeply seated, you know, that is so much a part of our civilisation and culture. It’s not really a
prejudice, but it is an eye opening experience to get, as it were, another look at it. A look at what might be beneath it.
And so, to get ready for my remarks on Nietzsche today it was simply enough, as I say, to switch around… the TV…
not enough, I mean I, unfortunately I had to read this stuff before, and all this. Probably when I was too young. Let’s
switch around and hear Oral Roberts discuss how much he loved everybody out in TV land and that ten big enemies
were coming after all of us. You know, he didn’t name any of them so it’s not very helpful. [crowd laughter]. I mean
if you knew who they were you could call the cops or something I guess. Those are “peace” officers. They carry
weapons. Like patriot missiles, peace keepers. But to hear Oral and the various morning preachers… and of course in
the case of Falwell, I think it’s just outstanding, because Falwell always loves his enemies. And the duplicity in it
is palpable, and I just think that someone would have to be incredibly naive not to feel it almost. Especially if you
have seen him in debate with some leader of, for example, a homosexual group, and he just goes: “I love you”. You
just know that somewhere in there is the desire to inter everyone. [crowd laughter]
More importantly, in the very texts that form the Christian tradition, like Thomas Aquinas are these frightening
moments that look marginal to the main tradition but I don’t think anyone is going to raise their hand and tell me Saint
Thomas Aquinas is a marginal figure in the history of Christianity. These blinding moments of clarity where we have
these people say “The chief pleasure will be to see the torments of the damned”. I mean, why will heaven be a lot of
fun? Well we will be there a long time and it will be like a Clive Barker movie. All the people we didn’t like will be
being torn apart, you know, like in one of those Clive Barker films and that will be a lot of fun. It will be an ongoing
splatter movie mixed with harp music. [crowd laughter]. It will be a real gig – a trip – it will be fun!
Well anyway. Nietzsche’s discourse would teach us to be a little more honest about this, I think. And when we intend
to punish or kill people, it would be nice to say that we intend to punish or kill them. By nice I mean not moral, we are
in this moral universe where duplicity is built into being virtuous. Still, you see how I said earlier for the Greeks
telling lies well is sort of openly acknowledged as something clever to do, but that duplicity is still built into the
concept of virtue in a way. I mean we can’t really tell the truth even about wars, as you know. We can’t really let it all
hang out and say “Well you know we started off… just invade Kuwait and get it back, but now we are really pissed,
and we want to kill all those damn Arabs, every one of them and that damn Saddam, and any of those other people
who are yelling and burning our flag too”.
Well, I have been out and around the country, and that’s the attitude out there. It’s not… it’s funny, sort of the lower
you go down the educational scale the more honest it gets. It’s kind of… that’s sort of nice. At the university we have
a lot of professors who believe the same thing who just won’t say it that way. They believe it, they just won’t say it.
Instead they’ll do a sort of a General Haig kind of discussion of it. The way Al Haig talks, sort of in state department-
ese, full of lots of “ing” words and coinages that are not found in the English language that, you know, just cover over
the real situation, when what Al Hague really wants to say is “I am in charge and the dark little people will die”.
[crowd laughter]. That’s the message. And it’s right and good that they should die, because they will die so that
everyone can be free in the New World Order, and right on let’s go get ’em; kick butt, drop bombs, they die, don’t
talk, kill.
So like… it’s like a proposal for surrender… a proposal for surrender as follows. “You surrender or we bomb you
while you sit there, but of course if you get up to leave we will bomb you while you are walking away.”. Is that a good
policy? See that’s almost Nietzschean, isn’t it? Surrender, but don’t move. Of course, if you don’t move, you won’t
have surrendered, so we’ll have to bomb you, but if you move we won’t be sure you have surrendered so we’ll have to
bomb you. So surrender, but we’ll bomb you is kind of a policy designed to do what? Bomb people! They can go,
“Don’t…”, but it won’t help, because they will have to be either still or moving, or some condition in between. Again,
it would be better openly to say “Now that we have got this thing going we are all good Christians who want to do the
right thing and we are all believers in good Democracy, but for the moment, let’s forget it. This is too much fun. Let’s
really hammer them. And let’s prove that our version of the Peloponnesian War, the one that made the Greeks so
confused about their values…”
In our culture, we had a war like that, that confused us about our values – Vietnam – and it seems kind of a
background theme of the current war, of a philosophy of the present to which I am now connecting the discourse of
Nietzsche, loosely. A target might be to kill the guilt and the fear that were produced by that other troubling moment
in history. Nothing would do that better than a clean kill with a huge majority for it. A quick clean kill. What better
basis on which to build a New World Order, than an order of barbarism… I mean, you know… than this massively
quick and effective barbarism which would accomplish what should be openly stated as a public goal of the war.
Namely, to prove that the peace love hippies were wrong and Rambo right, and that is in that earlier war, if only we
had just kept bombing and hitting them with everything we had, those damn peaceniks and those newspaper guys and
all those bleeding hearts wouldn’t have lost the war for us.
Well if we can go in now and show that massive force continually applied will bring this country to its knees, it will
be a way to demonstrate that that could have been done before. That all those people that raised all that hell were even
more wrong than they have already admitted. Good God, even more sold out than they were already sold. It’s like the
New World Order can’t tolerate even a little, just a little bit of opposition. And that may be true of it because it is, I
don’t know if it’s Nietzsche’s view but it’s mine, that systems of power connected to systems of value tend to spread
and become total. In other words, they tend to want to fill up the total field of discourse within which we discuss the
moral. This is well known about religions… as we, I mean… it helps to account for religious wars. The principle of
toleration is not built into people who have that kind of insight into the truth.
That’s why I wanted to begin – I did begin these lectures – by discussing fallibilism, not as some deep philosophical
principle, but as the following principle. That it’s okay to have beliefs, but suspect your own beliefs. That it’s
important to believe some things passionately, but it’s also important to have the wisdom to know that you could be
dead wrong. So, using Nietzsche to bring up this critique of some of the values that have come out of the so called
“Christian tradition”, I realise that I could be wrong, Nietzsche could be wrong. But all these arguments – and from
him, and the suggestions I have made during this hour – are meant to do are to suggest a kind of suspicion of that
tradition.
Now, Nietzsche does say what is the powerful… one of the powerful motivations behind Christianity. Which is – I
have argued – is deeply connected to the current world system. One of its powerful motivations is it does speak to
something that’s very important, and human beings may in fact quite generally share it. And that’s the need for love.
Christianity is sort of a lyrical religion in that respect, it speaks of love. And it’s hard not to know that it fudges the
distinction between the earthly and the carnal kind. It fudges that distinction. I don’t know how many of you have ever
been to an evangelical meeting out in the country, but that’s the night when all the men and women get dressed up in
their best clothes and go and sing these rousing songs and sweat in their best perfume and sing “Love lifted me”, and
it’s very difficult not to see Nietzsche’s point. That Christianity has always been a find for those who have repressed
sexuality. [crowd laughter]. It’s quite a find, it always has been.
So all I can do is suggest you read more Nietzsche. In a cynical time like this it is hardly necessary, most of you are
probably that cynical already anyway, maybe this was a waste of time. But I wanted to add to the economic and
political conditions what might be called “cultural conditions”, of which religion remains an important one and so the
discussion of Nietzsche fits there, and also it fits because it’s still a project for some, and a quite serious one. So now
that I have presented Nietzsche’s rather cynical view, in the next one I will discuss Kierkegaard’s view, but the
problem with this is that Christianity – as I have already argued – in a modern society is already a
very… idiosyncratic project. Very idiosyncratic.
I know that because I have been a faculty in residence and lived with students at a university and had them come in
and complain “My roommate is a real sky pilot”, by which they mean he reads the bible a lot and irritates them. And
it… that’s an easier way to get rid of a roommate than coming in and saying he is a Nazi, because the Nazi will just
put up some swastikas in the room and use some words you don’t like, the other guy will be up praying and irritating
you all night. [crowd laughter]. But Christianity I have been discussing here is not Christianity in the intimate sense of
faith that I will discuss when I do briefly discuss Kierkegaard, another critic of modern times. But that Christianity
that has become a public religion about which I guess the briefest Nietzsche critique would be that it’s open, as a
public religion.
In his appointment to politics Harry Truman I think is quoted as saying that in our system, to run for political office
you have got to pour God and Jesus all over everything like ketchup over your food. It’s just got to be covered up in it.
Now Carter was a different story. Someone said I had to say something about Jimmy Carter, in any course on ethics
you have got to talk about Jimmy Carter. And all I can say about Jimmy is that he is a good Christian, but he did
admit that he lusted in his heart after other women. If he had courage enough, he would have been Ted Kennedy.
[crowd laughter]. And if Ted Kennedy had the courage of Nietzsche, he would have said “Yeah I did it and I liked it
and you would have too if you had been there” [crowd laughter], which is probably true! Don’t you see I am not really
trying to be cynical here, it’s probably right! Nietzsche isn’t trying to be just cynical to irritate you folks, I mean that’s
probably right. Yes, you know, if you are rich, good looking, lots of people… yeah sure why not! So there’s like a
distinction there, there’s sort of Kennedy… Carter… and then wayyy down at the end of the spectrum is Richard
Nixon. Is it almost question time, I really don’t know what other nasty things to say about folks. [crowd laughter].

Kierkegaard and the Contemporary Spirit (1990)


Transcript: Okay, last time I may have dropped out of my West Texas mode for a moment and
become a little too philosophical, so I am going to try to restate a few things from Nietzsche in a
simple way, quickly, before I move on to some remarks about Kierkegaard. What I was trying to
evoke in you was more the spirit of Nietzsche than the specific text. The spirit of Nietzsche is
one of deep suspicion, and that suspicion is that power is intertwined with things that we
normally like to think of, even today, as not being dependent on power, for example: truth,
goodness, and so on. Nietzsche says they are.
Now Nietzsche says… and he uses historical models. Since we have already made remarks that
real history is material and philosophers generally use sort of idiographic and very brief
descriptions of historical periods, mainly to make points about them. Whether the Greeks were
really like that is another issue. A very troubling and problematic issue. But for Nietzsche the
Greeks had a kind of straightforward idea of virtue based on Excellence, which I discussed in the
very first lecture on Socrates. Excellence was to fulfil your human powers, so that among those
would be that if you had desires, the ability to meet them was quite important to being excellent.
Excellent people wouldn’t be filled with resentment and envy because mostly when they tried to
exercise a human power they would be able to meet their need.
Now, for Nietzsche, the Christian morality that grew out of a slave context. And this is not meant
to be a criticism of the slaves. And the only sense in which I used it as a criticism of Christianity
was as Christianity as a public religion, and I… there’s where I made my political points. But the
slave aspect of Christianity meant that its doctrines of love and compassion were rooted in the
resentment of a power that could not exercise itself. One of the things slaves have a problem
with is that they have powers too, but are constrained from exercising them.
Christianity therefore – on Nietzsche’s account – part of its function was compensatory. To
compensate for that power you don’t have in this one… in this world, by projecting a power in
another one. By loving people in this world, but the thematic underneath it – the thematic
underneath it, its motivation – that’s what Nietzsche argued was resentment, hatred and so on.
That made it all the more important to cloak those motives in a dialogue of love. Just as one has
a political doctrine of greed, best to cloak it in a political language of freedom and choice. Greed
doesn’t sell as well as freedom, choice and points of light.
So that’s my quick recap of Nietzsche. He’s to make us suspicious even about what people think
they really believe. That was another point. On the other side of resentment however, is religion
as resistance. So I have had some very helpful questions on that, and religion also serves this
function… and now I am referring back to some famous remarks of Karl Marx’s about religion
not only stupefies… that’s the remark about religion being the opium of the people. Marx didn’t
live long enough to know that today opium is the opium of the people. [crowd laughter]. We are
materialists now, like him. Today, you got a whole bunch of dissatisfied people, their opium is
opium. It’s more effective as opium, real opium is. It’s really opium.
But religion had this dual significance. That while resentment was there, there was also
resistance, and rebellion. In other words, it was a form of resistance to power and therefore itself
a… what? A power. So that’s where Nietzsche’s account becomes complicated in regard to power.
But what – if anything – is shocking about Nietzsche, it’s to look at these doctrines that are
considered; about the holy, the good, the true, the right and the virtuous, and analyse them in
terms of power. So that’s a brief recap of what I have said about Nietzsche.
I was also asked to explain – and I guess you always are – Nietzsche’s famous remark. He was not
the first to make it. Hegel was the first to make the remark “God is dead” in a certain context. But
Nietzsche is best known for saying “God is dead”, and my way of treating that is not like other
philosophers. I took Nietzsche to be making something like a sociological point. A point about
society. Nietzsche is trying to tell us something – and this is to go back to remarks I made earlier
too – about the condition of the modern world, where our lives are fragmented into a work week,
and then a festival day called “Saturday”. Well that’s if you’re not doing the work left over from
the week, or you don’t have the neighbours over, when it just becomes more work. No, you may
like your neighbours, I don’t know. But anyway, the work week, and Sunday as a sort of separate
segmented day set off for religion, when in Nietzsche’s view and mine and according to, as it
were, the guiding principles of the religious way of life itself, could not by the very nature of the
case be religion.
So the remark that God is dead is a remark about how society has changed. Nietzsche in his
famous parable where he discusses this said that you and I have killed him… “God is dead and
you and I have killed him”. In other words, we have ceased to live a life centred around God. And
he makes a shocking and I think brilliant remark when he says “What are these churches today if
they are not the tombs and the sepulchres of God. They give the best evidence to his death.
These churches, these creeds, what are they but his tombs”. So Nietzsche’s remark is about a
culture that can’t truly be centred in the… religious holy way of life anymore. Not that there
aren’t any more believers that really believe – okay, it’s not that – but that the culture has
segmented into one facet of life something that by its very nature should permeate the whole of
life. Because if there is a God, it clearly would permeate the whole of our lives, be the point of
them. And that’s the sense in which that God at the centre of the world is dead, and what’s in his
place are other world systems. Economic, political, and I discussed those too.
So that for me is the meaning to the remark “God is dead”. Of course at one level it’s a paradox,
because if you were an atheist you would think it was a strange remark, because what sense does
it make to say something died that never was there in the first place. So that’s why I take it to be
a historical/sociological style remark… is because God and/or gods are imminent, inside – as it
were – cultures, tribes and so on, not somewhere above them and outside of them. So
Nietzsche’s remark is that in our tribe that myth has lost its power to bind us all. Now, many
modern conservatives wish we had it back. Daniel Bell argues that an answer to America’s
problems is a rebirth of religion, but almost everything counts against that in a society divided.
Where labour is divided the way ours is, and where the first thing that would happen if we had a
rebirth of it would be experts in it, specialists, and new TV shows about it. Which is where we get
onto Kierkegaard and his brilliant attempt to try to save more than Christianity as a personal,
singular relation with something else, about which Kierkegaard won’t say much. But what he
calls… what I will call his attack on Christendom, and it’s not so different than Nietzsche’s.
Kierkegaard is the author of a famous remark, and he says “In a country – or in a place – where
all are Christians, ipso facto none are Christians”. He reminds us that the Gospel – the
challenging Gospel – that arguably someone like Martin Luther King took probably too seriously,
not in my view, but in the view of some, that arguably there it would be dangerous to be a
Christian. But we all know today to be a Christian – a famous Christian – like Billy Graham doesn’t
mean you have the task of Moses which is to lead your people out of bondage. It means you have
the job of playing golf with the Pharaoh, you know. I mean… that’s a different function of
religion, right? To play golf with the Pharaoh isn’t the same thing as leading your people out of
bondage. So, religion in that sense is just a bullwort for the status quo. You know, it’s praying for
the troops, praying for victory and so on.
Kierkegaard was a brilliant critic of this use of religion. And he is a philosopher that someone I
studied with – Louis Mackey, a very brilliant man – is an expert on. And he used to advise young
students who are on their way to the seminary not to take his course. Because he said even
though Kierkegaard is the most sophisticated modern defender of Christianity, it would be very
counter-productive for your career as a minister to study Kierkegaard with me. So by all means,
avoid my course. Take a course in Marx, Nietzsche, anybody, but don’t take Kierkegaard because
in a way from the inside he makes the point, in a way. One of my favourite books, and its one
where I may drain some of the Christianity out of it as I build the case that Kierkegaard makes
about what “human subjects” are, to return to our topic of “human values”. I don’t think we have
left it far.
But to return to our topic of human values, Kierkegaard wants to build a case in a very famous
book and I’ll talk about it next. And it is another reaction against accepting Hegel’s, sort of,
conservative thesis that the world kind of came to an end with modern life; the bureaucratic
state, the capitalist economy. Kierkegaard is a critic of that and he’s a critic of a fundamental
notion to it which is that each one of us are individual subjects somehow separated from each
other, almost like monads, individuals. A concept that might be criticised in a West Texas way by
saying “Rugged individualism leads to ragged individuals”. So, a more sophisticated version I’ll
give you in Kierkegaard of that, and remind you that we are talking here about one of the most
sophisticated defenders of Christianity, so that you’ll see that I am going to try to be balanced,
tolerant, liberal and fair, and give both versions.
The book I have in mind is “The Sickness Unto Death” by Soren Kierkegaard. A very… as you can
see, you are in for the happy part of the course now [crowd laughter]. “The Sickness Unto Death”,
which by the way, with Kierkegaard you have to be on guard for irony all the time. Underneath –
the sub heading – is “A Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening”. None
of that is going to happen in this book. [crowd laughter]. In fact, the odd thing about “The
Sickness Unto Death” – and I am going to discuss this book because I find it just a fascinating
and wonderful book – it’s shocking and it does hit a part of us that I mentioned before when I
discussed our search for meaning in modern conditions, how difficult it is, and a fragmented life
shaped by work and other imperatives. Kierkegaard in this book is going to argue not for
psychology, but about why psychology is in principle impossible. In other words – to make the
argument banally – it’s about why psychologists won’t do you any good unless they give you
medicine. If they can give you medicine it will knock out a lot of your human worries, but other
than that there is a deep problem, and it’s because the psyche itself is a problem.
So, now someone said to me they didn’t understand very much of my last lecture. We are going
to read you the densest passage that I know of in all of philosophy that opens Kierkegaard’s
book. And I have got to remind you before I read it that it’s a bit of a joke because it’s a parody
of Hegel’s language, but beneath the parody is an important joke about what we are as subjects.
So let me start with that, and… don’t ask me after I read this what it means [crowd laughter]. I
mean I’ll have a little bit to say about it, but it’s just… It’s written beautifully and we’ll do this
part and, [flicks through pages], and then we’ll move on.
Okay. “Despair is the sickness unto death”. That’s section A. You may have wondered what it was,
it’s despair. A condition we don’t have anymore so we don’t need to worry about it. Well actually,
this book will argue that despair is not a mood or a psychological state. It’s not either one of
those. I’ll get around to what else it is, for Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard begins this way. “A human being is spirit”, now this is the language that some of you
were making fun of. I like it, it’s ironic and fun. “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit
is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s
relating itself to itself in the relation. Now the self is not the relation but is the relation’s
relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal
and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between
two. Considered in this way, a human being is not a self.”
That’s a long joke. See, that shows you that philosophers don’t have to share a sense of humour
with everyone else, right. [crowd laughter]. No, the long joke that’s hidden in that passage is that
the self is not a substantial thing but a deep relation, and it’s not even that relation but the
relating of a relation. Now let me try to explain what Kierkegaard is driving at. We are constituted
in that paradoxical condition where we can do two of the things that we have tried to do
throughout these lectures: think in a quasi-utopian way, about projecting from everyday life
about what the world might be like, and even think about things as immense as infinity, and on
the other hand be absolutely stuck in the finite banal conditioned world of everyday life. So we
are a synthesis between those. We are a synthesis between our desire for freedom and our
recognition of brutal necessity. But because we are a relation, we are incomplete. The self – and
here he agrees with David Hume and others – is not yet a self.
Now, this is not a mood problem. A psychologist can’t fix it because this despair that
Kierkegaard analyses in this book constitutes the self. The self is this despairing relation. You
can’t be cured of it. You are it. You can’t go to the psychologist and go “I am in despair, fix it” in
this sense, because that would be to obliterate your self that’s built in this despairing relation.
Now, despair, you’re going to go “That’s too big a word, I am not in despair that much”. Still not
thinking along the lines of Kierkegaard’s argument, because there are various forms of despair.
I’ll quickly lay them out. I like the despair part, because everybody’s too happy at this point in
the course.
There is despair that… takes the form of not being conscious of having a self. That’s very
common today, I would argue. Despair in just not being conscious that you have a self, that there
is this integrated narrative called your life, but more or less just being telematically conscious, if I
may contrast it with another form of consciousness. Scene by scene like “The Days and Nights of
Molly Dodd“, scene by scene by scene by scene by scene by scene, but no connecting narrative,
no connecting thread to the story. Not being conscious of having a self, that’s despair. That’s the
despair that fills you with emptiness when you go “Well what does my life mean?” and there is not
a narrative to fit it into. That may not even occur to you. If you are that telematically conscious, it
may never occur to you.
Some people die a real death never having been alive. That’s why zombie movies scare us, you
know, been to a mall, seen a zombie movie, you should be scared. You don’t know how many
people will die that never took the gamble to try to live.
But despair would be… simple if only people were in despair who were not conscious of having a
self. You can also be in despair… and in fact I will skip one of the other forms, because this is
one that’s probably most common and where Kierkegaard opens up the biggest problems with
our ordinary understanding of what we are as psychological beings. Which is to add another level
to our account of our material conditions as humans, and that’s the despair that is unaware that
it is despair. Now well, you are all going to go “Well, that’s unfair, that’s philosophical, that’s
unfair”. No. Kierkegaard says that’s the incurable kind. The incurable kind is the despair that is
unaware that it is despair. Now the reason that one’s incurable is you haven’t got the crisis. A
crisis will make you face despair, but it won’t cure it. You will know more about what you are as a
self.
The kind of despair that is unaware that it is despair. That’s… hopeless. There is no way around
that. Now, when he calls it “The sickness unto death”, that too is a kind of irony. Because it’s a
joke in a way, because there is not the least possibility that anyone will actually die from despair.
They may dress in black and go to Bergman movies or whatever, but there is not a real chance
you’ll die from it. It won’t really kill you. It’s not that kind of death. That kind of death would be
wished for in a dialectic, or dialogue, like Kierkegaard’s. Real despair of the Kierkegaardian kind
is characterised over here as follows.
Kierkegaard says “Literally speaking, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone will die
from this sickness or that it will end in physical death”. You may notice that Woody Allen, you
know, constantly despairs and frets, but it really means he is just a hypochondriac, he’s not
going to die from despair, but I have made that point. “On the contrary, the torment of despair is
precisely this inability to die”. This is not an argument for suicide, it’s even worse than that.
Suicide won’t help either, for Hamlet’s kind of reasons. “Thus it has more in common with the
situation of a mortally ill person who lies struggling with death and yet cannot die. Thus to be
sick unto death is to be unable to die, and yet not as if there was hope for life, but when we learn
to know the even greater danger, we hope for death. When the danger is so great that death
becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die”.
Now, the only reason that I have taken us this far into Kierkegaard, a brilliant Christian… for him,
a paradoxical answer to this is a relation with Christ, which he admits is absurd. You can read
more of him and decide if you want to believe something absurd. He admits it, he’s a joker about
it. I wanted to try to lead it back into social theory, because I think that it is arguable that
subjects, selves, human beings – about whose values we have been discussing, philosophising –
may very well be that the human situation today is one of that despair in that sense. And I am
going to use some very modern and seemingly off the topic examples of what I mean by that.
Seemingly off the topic.
I am going to try to use two genre of horror movies to explain the difference. Does anybody
remember the old B horror movies, or even the, sort of, Freddy… the 13th… The big danger in
them is that you will die. I mean that’s what everybody is trying to avoid, and that’s what
generates the fear. But that is not the fear generated in the new near fiction science fiction
like Blade Runner. In Blade Runner, the greatest hope is to be able to die. You know they won’t
let you. They will cybernetically make sure that you’ll be around. They will record your image and
save it, shoot it to rockets in space, and the desire to be obliterated, to die a concrete death,
becomes an almost utopian hope.
Now, you are going “Oh, you are crazy Rick, that’s too… I don’t understand it, it’s too weird”, it
isn’t! Why do you think apocalypse movies are popular? Because they are scary? Uh-uh. Mad Max
is exciting because compared to the boredom, the banality and the despair of everyday life, in
this kind of society, what could be more exciting that an apocalypse and fast stripped down cars,
shoot Mad Max across the desert and a return to… it’s not that the apocalypse horrifies us at all.
Now by the apocalypse I am not speaking biblically. We have technologically achieved the ability
to create it long ago. Don’t worry about the atom bomb in that sense. It’s old fashioned
technology by now. You know, it’s well within the reach now, as we know, of… peripheral
countries can build them. We are scared of that, but it’s old fashioned technology.
Apocalypse movies create in the audience… and it’s pretty easy to see when you go into them
with younger people who are less ashamed to show their emotions. When the big boom goes off,
that’s great, it wipes the slate clean and now we can start the movie. Here’s Mad Max and these
people running around and the desire for death is the greatest hope here. That’s not… these kids
are not going to die from it. But it is… that desire is even a source of pleasure and joy.
Another movie that I can mention – now maybe many of you haven’t seen it – is Heathers, which
marks this same movement into a society of… where despair is this kind of condition, this
structural thing. In Heathers, the young juvenile delinquent who they make fun of by calling him
J.D., which could stand for James Dean, or juvenile delinquent, is a rather uninteresting young
man who is planning a Woodstock for the 90’s. Namely, to get everybody in the high school to
sign a collective suicide note – that they are not aware of, he has put another little thing over it
– and then blow up the high school and kill everyone in it. That will be the Woodstock of the
90’s. Now, young audiences go, and according to feedback to me – I receive about this movie – is
that this is a perfectly acceptable new James Dean. He says at one point in the film… “Why am I
not a rebel?”. One of the women in the film says “You are a psychotic”, and he goes “Well you say
tomato, I say tomato“, I mean, who is to say?
Well, the thematics of presenting that possibility – an apocalyptic one – as a hopeful one, only
can be hopeful if structurally there is a greater danger than even dying. At least in an apocalypse
everyone would die, and you would see other people and you would be one of them, and there
would be the real embodied feel of it. But… to be in a situation where you were unable to die, but
trapped in this cycle of despair which Kierkegaard talks about, which to refer back to Marx,
Weber and others may be no more or less than just the cycle of our boring daily existence
without projects beyond these limited ones I have named: getting a boat, getting some new
shoes, resoling the Reeboks, getting the kids in the “right” school.
Under such conditions moments may arise, Kierkegaard argues, in which – when we really face
ourselves – the hope would be to find a way to die. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t commit suicide,
but that wouldn’t even solve it. You would be too worried. You would say “What will the kids do
after I am gone?”. See that wouldn’t solve it either, because what has structured you is this
despair. It is you. That’s again why, you have a lot of therapists, but they can’t fix this
Kierkegaardian problem. It is not a mere psychological problem, it is a structural condition of the
self. My argument here is that under our modern conditions, it is quite general.
So, apocalypse movies – on this kind of account – will give us a social compensation for this
inability, for this despair. Now they will also give us a thrill. Things could be otherwise, there
could be the big bomb after all. I mean, it’s joked about. It should be. In a way… it’s one way to
express this very despair. It’s joked about. The more frightening movies, as I say, are movies like
Blade Runner. Where a very near future is presented in which you, like all other commodities, will
be recycled. Where that is the greater danger – not to die a death in despair – but to live a life
that’s not human.
The real danger is one that is summarised beautifully by a theologian friend of mine at Duke. The
old problem of Theology, which has always been closely connected to Philosophy, as you may
know. The old problem was the unbeliever; the non-believer. The new problem is the non-
person. This Kierkegaard had already foresaw… you know, had a foretaste of. It isn’t the problem
of people not believing, it’s the problem of finding people. Are there people? Do we want to call
these beings that are walking around “people”? And that isn’t… can’t… and I don’t want to make
this sound elitist. That can’t be said from a standpoint separate from you being one of them. You
know, raised in the same televised culture, where the simulated images of the “real” are just as
“real” as real, and sometimes more “real” than real.
I mean, it is not a problem about which one can be an elitist in any sense, because it is quite
generally a social malady, in much the [same] way as the massive support for the war now could
be understood as some social malady of a certain kind, like shellshock; the reaction of people
struggling to be sane in insane conditions. Despair is a reaction of people struggling to be
human in inhuman conditions. But the answer to this is not to… all a psychologist can do if you
go to them… I mean, it’s not “all”. It’s a pretty good thing. You don’t want to worry about this
kind of thing; “despair”, losing your humanity. There are drugs. And I am not talking now about
the “just say no” kind. Those are, as we know, for the lower classes. There are middle class drugs
that can be prescribed to you legally that, as it were, handle these existential worries. Valium is
one. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Dilor is an even better version. Totally kills the fear of death, just pop
one pill and it just shuts off the electrochemical things that make you despair, fear death, have
anxiety.
Valium, already I think is… well, it’s been replaced though by a whole series now, right, of
designer tranquilisers. I mean, it’s still the major general one. But now there are designer
tranquilisers. Well there is a point here, and a very deep one. We have been tracing throughout
here a series of human projects, and yet we have not yet faced the greatest danger: that if the
story of the development of society in the late 19th Century in its broadest sense was the
replacement of manual labour by machine labour in the advancing countries of the world, the
story of the 20th Century will surely be in part, and in broad strokes, the replacement of
intellectual labour – thinking, and even feeling and emoting – by machine labour.
How much of that has already occurred? I am not up here to spin a science fiction story for you.
Well, we already have near future movies that project cyborgs and stuff, but we also have actually
technically built virtual reality suits, we have hosts of designer drugs, we have TV and movie stars
that redesign their bodies, that redesign their iconic images, that come out with a different kind
of soul. For example, Michael Jackson. We couldn’t decide whether he was Diana Ross – you know
at one time he kinda looked like Diana Ross – one of the young Jacksons, a motown singer, or a
Walt Disney star, because he is rewhittled, reshaped.
Now in terms of this whole discourse we have had about what humans are and their values as
they develop historically, probably the greatest danger in the final situation that might be faced,
is what’s left of the human at all under modern conditions. What is left to talk about in this
dimension? And in that situation you have to face squarely this problem that Kierkegaard – I have
to say with some nostalgia – called “despair”, because it’s just as common today to find people
who are giddy over the current situation. I mean really, they write books called “The Ecstasy of
Communication“, about how much more… how wonderful it is to be an image rather than a
person. In that regard… let me try to make this… get back to a West Texas level with this so you
can follow me.
For Reagan, it was so much more convenient to be an image than a person. A real person like
him is kind of a drag, semi-good actor… semi-good, he was good in that one movie where they
cut off his legs… [crowd laughter]. Made him shorter for one thing. Magnificent as an icon. Great
TV icon, which was his function. You know, and I know, that he couldn’t run a government.
That’s not debatable. Just like a cabbage can’t drive a BMW, we don’t debate issues like that.
[crowd laughter]. What was important about him was his iconic significance. It was more real than
real.
See, FDR was a real president. You know… real. You know, FDR. There were sort of all these
embodied things about him, you know, the wheelchair, tied down… could sort of feel
the real about him. With Reagan, his telematic image was sort of more real than even real. Sort of
transcends even our notions of limited reality because, well, here’s a famous Hollywood phrase:
“Larger than life”. That’s what we say about screen figures. He was larger than life. By which I
suppose we mean he was dead. And in a sense, it was totally irrelevant. Because as long as the
images kept flowing and some other hack actor could dress up like him to show up and wave
under the knowledge… under the noise of the helicopters, it mattered not!
In a society – and this is the point I am making – in a society where images count to that extent,
what it means to be a subject… what it means to try to find a project… gets to be re-understood
in terms of what it means to find the right place to buy the clothes, the best place to go to
school, the right kind of accent to use, and who to get to know. It becomes a matter of fashion.
For Kierkegaard, that was rather despairing. He thought that humans driven to such an extent –
driven to that extent of socialisation; hyper-socialisation – would greatly prefer death, but would
pretty much unable to pull the thing off. Just like the young man in Heathers doesn’t quite get
around to blowing up the high school, and the young audience is very disappointed that he
doesn’t! Everyone that I talked to who saw the film, all the young people went “Well it would have
been so much better if he had blown it up! I mean, we did want a Woodstock for the 90’s. It
would have been real, I mean, send a message to the whole country”.
Well, this is where we reach a sort of limit on what we can do in terms of either social theory or
human values, and that’s where we begin to discuss the possible disappearance of the subject of
that discourse: the human. And if human beings were constituted in what they physically did and
what they thought – which seemed to be what we were talking about for most of the course,
right? – then if in the nineteenth century we began to replace physical labour with machine
labour, and now every home has a PC that’s smarter than any of us used to be! When mental
labour becomes replaced, what functions are left over for humans to perform becomes really
problematic. It becomes really problematic.
Now, the despairing way to look at it is that we have become useless, however that is only in the
scale of values I have been criticising. In other words, we would become useless in the sense that
they don’t need our labour. That’s the scale of value I have been criticising. And I think part of
the giddiness of this situation within which the need for humans to do certain things is becoming
erased in society through the advance of capitalism; technology, if you want to put in a cheap
way. The other side of that is the giddiness of the possibility of freedom. I mean after all, freed
from manual labour doesn’t sound so bad, freed from mental labour doesn’t sound so bad,
especially given the boring kinds computers do! You know, computers do a lot of bookkeeping
and a lot of numbers stuff, and who in the hell likes that! Well, I mean, you know, there may be
someone who does, but they can still do it as a hobby, you know. If they have got to keep some
books, they can still do it!
But the other side of this social system, which seems as it were to squash out what was
understood as human values. And I mean now in the broadest sense, insofar as humans
thought… something, did… something… begins to squash that out. The other side of it is the
need for the necessity of some of these things disappears and leaves open possible projects of
freedom again, but at another level now. What those would look like – what they would be like –
would be much different. They can’t really be talked about. Just like the social situation I am
trying to describe is difficult to evoke, because we are in the middle of it.
You know, it’s always hard to evoke the present because you’re in it. It’s kind of like the
aquarium fish trying to describe the aquarium. I mean, it’s home, you know, “Here I am, there’s a
[mumbles, pretends to be a fish]”. But what we would need, and what we cannot have, in my
view, is a view from outside the aquarium, sort of looking at it, where its limits are, and its
boundaries. In this situation, the one I am describing now, and trying to connect up now as the
third part of my social account, and the scariest probably for me, is the culture that – many of
you have heard this word – the culture which is postmodern…
I think we have a very modernist economy still, a very modernist State, but when we hear the
phrase “postmodern culture”, one of its reference is a culture based on spectacles and images
that have become more real than the real thing. Where Madonna is more real than your real lover.
Where the real thing is not God, but Coca-Cola. Coke is it. You know, IT… That’s a strong claim.
[crowd laughter]. “It”. What do you get to be more than that? It. It’s almost like a Hindu religion.
You know, this is the cultural aspect of society, and culture is very important because it’s where
we draw our meanings from, and our identities. It’s in a culture that we learn how to speak a
language, what our identities are.
In a totally commodified culture – I have mentioned, you know, phone sex and that sort of thing –
in a totally commodified culture, it’s hard to decide whether you have just adopted a fashion, or
you are developing as a person. In fact, how you could argue between the two becomes very
difficult in a culture like ours. Does it mean more than you now jog and do diet pills. Does it
mean something more? It becomes difficult to say what more that is. That attempt to articulate
meaning finds all these bizarre outlets. Shirley MacLaine chakras, I mean people watch that on TV
without just bursting – not in laughter – but in either laughter or tears, because when you are
driven to that extreme to find some meaning, then your condition is a sickness unto death… if
you are driven to that extreme to find meaning.
When the only warmth you can get is to cuddle up by a flag that you are all too cynical to really
believe in. It’s long gone and we all know it. The new patriotism is a cynical one, in a way. We
know better now, but we just have to forget that we know better. When that’s your comfort… is
to go into that… as a kind of new lifestyle, sort of like yuppy-ism is over and greed… there must
be something to give meaning… oh there is! I forgot about the flag. Well, what’s next? Well
maybe baseball. We’ll have a… you know, they made a bunch of baseball movies, maybe
everybody will get back into baseball.
The point here is that what these things are don’t look like human choices or human values
anymore, but human commodities; things you can buy, you know. I mean you can’t walk in a 7-
Eleven without being able to buy a piece of identity. We all know that when you put on a hat that
says “Lonestar Beer”, you’ve bought a kind of identity. But no less so than when you show up at
Harvard in your little wool sweater. They code certain kinds of identities, and the fear is that
beneath them, what we have understood and discussed in here as “human values” have been, as
it were, dried up by the very ability to market them. By the ability to turn them into goods for
sale, and worse than that, into images, and into cultural products of each one of has the trouble
of saying, you know, as I say, why we are not one.
How could I not be aware of this as we film this, right? Because I have no control over the image
production, in a certain sense, and even the people who film and so on… it goes beyond that. We
are in a telematic world in that sense, where you could have a revolution in Beijing, have the
pictures over here in two minutes, and then forget about it in a month, and three months later
have one of the people on The Phil Donahue Show. That kind of society produces different kinds
of people. The question is whether we still want to call them that or not. At a certain point, we
don’t! I don’t, anyway. This is my view… where they reach… I call it the “D.Q. threshold”; the Dan
Quayle threshold. Beneath that I cease to give an analysis of human values or of the subject.
Beneath that threshold, I am dealing with what Descartes called “cleverly constructed
automatons”, dealing with people without affect. In other words, they can fake affect. They can
pretend to be moved, but can’t be moved. You know, where being moved was an inner relation.
I’ll try another example to evoke this postmodern scene that I will discuss again in the next
lecture, not using Kierkegaard, but using a little Freud, but what the hell, it’s something. Measure
the distance this way. Try to measure the distance between Wuthering Heights and the interior of
reading that novel, Wuthering Heights. You know, that’s a love story, I mean it’s really a love
story because it’s scary and crazy and embodied like love, its nuts. You know, the guy loves the
woman so much, he’ll follow her forever and drive her crazy, even into hell if she dies. You know,
it’s just a… It’s a loony, scary novel, but it has a tangible feel and it has affect, and that’s what I
am coding as still real. Now, let’s compare that to Love Story. [crowd laughter].
One way to measure the historical distance we have come is by measuring the distance between
Wuthering Heights and Love Story. I don’t know what you thought about the movie, but
the book‘s real short. [crowd laughter]. And my own feeling was that him having a lot of money
didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt a bit. There’s an immense distance that has been travelled by human
subjectivity – humans as subjects – between Wuthering Heights and Love Story, and I hate to say
it, there has been some distance travelled between Love Story and now, and movies like
Heathers, Blade Runner, or just visiting Los Angeles. I mean, I don’t need to use examples, just
visit Los Angeles. Just walk down the walk of stars at one o’clock in the morning, and ask
yourself “Are these people really here, or is this central casting?” And it isn’t a funny question.
And as our society develops in this telematic way, it’s not going to be funny to ask it around the
Christmas dinner table about Uncle Henry, “Is that Uncle Henry, or is it just someone playing
Uncle Henry? The further postmodern insight is: what difference does it make! See, that’s the
thing Reagan’s handlers understood. It doesn’t make any difference! They’re buying it! Well,
that’s all I have to say for now…

Philosophy and Post-Modern Culture (1990)


Transcript: A brief recap of the whole journey we have taken here. We tried to as it were retrace,
sort of, the history of the accounts of human values given in the Western philosophical tradition.
That account seemed to dead end with some rather ordinary philosophical problems. In other
words, we found out that most of our accounts wouldn’t work too well, until we got to Hegel’s
account, which reminded us that human values and moral and ethical problems come up in
historical circumstances, which then forced us to investigate society and history, which opened
up immense topics that we have only been able to say suggestive things about.
Those topics are… we have addressed through these second set of lectures today. We have tried
to address a few of them. Topics relating to the economy we have tried to… I tried to distil some
of what I consider Marx… to be important insights Marx has into the economy, and others. In
terms of the State, I didn’t assign any readings by Max Weber, but I did suggest you look at some
Kafka on the State. Then I ended up with culture in the last lecture, and when I got around to
culture today, you may have noticed that my remarks became less systematic. Now, I have got to
explain why. And that’s that a culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar non
systematic character. It’s like the Fall TV schedule. All you really know about it, right, is that it is
going to appear on a kind of grid. But culture in general, we are not even sure about the grid let
alone, you know, which dumb new sitcom goes in it, but we are not sure about the grid.
So, when you discuss cultural phenomena today, you almost have to go phenomena by
phenomena to see how they fit. But it becomes crucially important for the kind of account I have
been trying to give, that if the project is what I said it was in the sets of lectures before – trying
to create a human life that is free and so on – it becomes crucially important if the culture itself is
beginning to, as it were, destroy, deconstruct or disrupt the very conditions for being human at
all. Because it becomes pointless to talk about free humans in the absence of humans. So, the
problem of freedom was bad enough, right? Everybody went “I don’t think that can ever be done”,
but by who, now is the question, which is even worse. So that’s been the trail that we have
followed.
Now, the only reason that I am mentioning Freud at all in these last lectures is to remind us, and
take us back for a moment to Kierkegaard and deepen that analysis, where I did mention despair,
and used a kind of existential motif to turn it into a social one. Despair not as, sort of, an
existential thing like a Bergman movie, “The Seventh Seal“, or something, but as a social malady
that is not merely psychological. Many of you have had the experience, I am sure, of going to a
therapist and hearing them describe the problems you have with your husband and how you
should adjust, and you go “Geez, I don’t think it’s that, I think it’s really the whole situation, you
know, the fact that he has all the money and my life is shit, and I think that’s the problem” – we’ll
cut that… anyway… – “My life is a mess, and that’s the problem”. Well those objective problems
were what I was trying to show despair to be, and not ones that can be fixed, as it were, by
simply, you know, having someone say: “adjust”.
Well, this last part, where I am going to talk about Freud, is similarly not therapeutic, because
that’s not the interesting part of Freud to me. The book I have suggested is “Civilisation and its
Discontents“, which stands… which has nothing to do… doesn’t discuss at all
Freud’s Oedipal drama, so there will be no talk of penis envy. I mean, whatever Freud may have
thought about that, or why, I don’t care. This has to do with the processes that are, as it were –
to follow a parallel kind of argument with Marx’s – much of human civilisation has been built by
economic motivations of which people were culturally unaware. In other words, they have been
motivated economically, but cultural meaning made them unaware of it. That’s a simple way to
put one of Marx’s sort of sceptical arguments.
A way to look at Nietzsche’s arguments could be to frame them in terms of the State, if you want
to talk about power. They are motivated by principles of power, but ones of which we are
unaware, sort of, of where they are rooted. To move to Freud, we will talk again about how our
lives are motivated in ways of which we may be unaware, and in Freud, of course, the great
discovery is the discovery of the unconscious. In a way, Freud’s work hinges on an insight that
makes all of philosophy problematic. Freud was that thinker who reminded us that the conscious
mind – which was the topic of philosophy, both in terms of cognitive things and values – is a very
small part of our psychic life.
Freud compares the conscious mind, in the book I have – I am talking about now – he
compares the conscious mind to a… garrison. A captured, tiny garrison in an immense city. The
city of Rome, with all its layers of history, all its archaic barbarisms, all its hidden avenues,
covered over by civilization after civilization. And the conscious… That’s our mind, that whole
thing. But the conscious part of it is that one garrison that’s clear, that sort of holds out in this
captured city. A magnificent metaphor for all the surrounding motives, motivations, motifs,
desires, that drive us – that are not philosophical – that cannot, even if we talk to our therapist a
long time, all be brought up at once.
Now, it is true that Freud’s goal, was that the “it“; the unconscious, the “id” – translated by
Americans as the “id” – in German, the “it”, kind of a more… normal word. The “it” – the “id” – was
to become conscious. Ego, the English word again being less spectacular: “I”, the “I”. I don’t know
why translators do that, it’s to make the person sound like they are a scientist, you know. Freud
says “it” and “I”, and we go “id” and “ego”. And all of a sudden it sounds like science. It’s not. It’s
just a… it’s a myth, but a very interesting and fascinating one.
So the goal of analytic treatment would be for those unreflected massive areas – again to go back
to that metaphor of the city – to become part of the garrison as it spreads out to things we are
clear about. In other words, it’s not a bad metaphor saying we shouldn’t be clear about who we
are, and have an “I”, or a self, or a subject. Now, why am I bringing this up now? Well, to contrast
it with my last remarks about culture, if the goal of psychoanalysis is that the unreflected parts of
us become reflected, that the “it” become the “I”, then the goal of a mass simulational culture –
and this is a remark that I am using from the Frankfurt school, don’t worry about it.
The goal of a mass telecommunication culture is psychoanalysis in reverse. It’s that the little, last
remaining parts of that garrison become unconscious. It’s precisely to reverse that process of
enlightenment. Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse gear. Precisely to wipe out that last little
garrison of autonomy. It is a constant assault upon it. That was why, and the last time I was out
here, I approached it first from this religious angle of Kierkegaard’s, and characterised the
assault as one that caused despair. Where despair was not a mood, but a structure that belongs
to a captured garrison. Not an accidental feature of a captured garrison, but part of it. A
structure of it. Fundamental to it.
And so now, the reason to use the Freudian text is to remind us that the kind of culture I am
talking about is simply to reverse that process that Freud saw as the goal of “talking it out”. Well,
philosophy has always been a form of therapy in that sense. You all know that from nights when
your life has felt like it wasn’t working and you got together with somebody you liked and you
got drunk and you talked about “what did it all mean?”, or “what does it all mean?”, and you start
talking it out. Well the goal of that is that those unreflected parts are to become reflected.
The account I am giving of this mass telecommunication culture – postmodern culture – is that
it’s goal is the opposite. That the “I” become “it”. That the parts that were just yours become
general property. So that even if you are an idiosyncratic single woman, like “The Days and
Nights of Molly Dodd” again, which is a nice thing to be, but by the time you have watched a few
of those, there is not much of you left that isn’t “it”. You can forget about it, it’s been
understood, it’s now a part of the general property of everyone.
I gave the example earlier, I’ll return to it for the fourth time, of the telephone sex. It’s just an
amazing phenomenon to me. First of all, I can’t imagine anyone that bored, but in any case,
there your deepest fantasies, which Freud was going to draw out in an analytic framework, now
you just… that’s the way that something that was going to be “I”, you know, that special thing,
no matter how perverse, and remember Freud… when something becomes reflected in Freud’s
picture – it doesn’t mean… I mean, you may not know this – but even if it’s sick, you are
supposed to remember it, and it is supposed to become part of the part of you that you know.
So you dig up even really ugly memories, so that you can know them, and know them about
yourself. It may not be pleasant, in fact it isn’t. But then again, that’s part of the pleasure
principle of mass culture, is it does just the opposite. It takes socially uncomfortable memories,
and takes them out of that clear garrison, and throws them into the wasteland around the city. In
the way that elements of the culture of the late 60’s broke everyone’s heart. Because families
were divided, the country was divided. No-one knew what kind of culture we should have after
that, or during that. No-one knew who the heroes were. Whether it was the boys who were forced
to fight the grunts down there, or Quaker pacifists who froze in jails in this city. No-one had the
guts to choose, or the way to choose.
So our culture since then – has been not just about the 60’s, but other great revolutionary
moments, as I am not afraid to say – is in the process of continually burying and reburying them.
Making them a part of the “it”, scattered out all around. I can go further back, based on my
father’s memories. Great moments of rebellion like the populist movement around the turn of
the century, The Knights of Labour, and so on. It’s the goal of a mass culture to bury that. It’s a
goal of mass culture to take that part of a culture where we have begun to reflect and
understand, and reverse it and make it unconscious.
So, that’s the reason the discourse of Freud is important. It’s because the parts of our culture
that we understand and can reflect on are just those tiny garrisons, [and] around it the mass of
the culture. And one can think in our situation, of the tonnes of information, for example. This
city probably has – this city we are in – you know, ten billion tonnes of paper on which are
printed billions and billions and billions of words. Perfectly analogous to Freud’s unconscious.
No-one is going to dig most of them up. Most of them have no meaning to anyone. The goal of
mass culture is to make sure that the narratives of our lives fit somewhere in those documents.
Just as fileable, malleable, and trainable as possible.
During the break, at the end of the other lecture, I had another movie suggested to me that
raises the possibility, in another way, and again in a way that would have bothered Freud,
because for Freud… I mean similar with Proust, I don’t know if any of you read long books, like
“Rememberance of Things Past“, but to the extent you remember the past you again expand the
room of the “I”, the garrison, the little clear part of your head… dig it up from it’s buried past. So
that’s the process working in the direction of enlightenment, which it can. It can work in that
direction, but my argument has been that it is endangered in ways that we couldn’t suspect. The
movie I have in mind here is Total Recall.
In Total Recall, the character thinks throughout that he’s a revolutionary hero, and it all seems to
be taking place in the conscious, clear garrison of the mind; the I; the conscious, clear place. As
many of you who have seen Total Recall know however, the dream tape that he is on, which gives
him real memories and avoids all… by the way, let me say this… don’t be too cynical about this.
In Total Recall, it is true that the people that sold him the vacation are telling the truth about
vacations. Vacations are a pain in the behind. They are a lot of trouble, and why not just come
back after a few hours with all the right memories, but with no bug bites, and you know, no flat
tyres, and then go on. So, it’s a good product. That’s the dialectic of the situation, you see, it’s
also a good product. But after he has fought this great battle… and remember, this whole movie
has taken place in this clear spot, right? It looks like an action movie.
You’ll notice that the vacation he ended up buying was called “Blue Sky Over Mars”, which is how
the movie ends, with these blue skies over Mars. You know, with memories like that, now he’s a
revolutionary hero, and it’s conscious. See, it looks conscious. So the duplicity that Freud located
in consciousness recurs in culture in an even more savage way. Because even in the most private
parts of the “I”, where we think we are clearest, in principle we can’t be sure that they are not
already invaded, inculturated, stamped, coded, filed, indexed. Not in a direct, crude way like in
total recall, because television is already more subtle than that. Again, from my generational
perspective things may look different, but, I, you know, I have to use it… you know, you can use
yours when you want to, we can talk later!
But from my generational perspective, it’s been a very bizarre experience to see your earlier life
recreated as a kind of drama of a period in which you quasi-recognise yourself, but realise that
they have invaded everything that meant anything to you and taken it over as a game like Trivial
Pursuit, you know. It’s like… you know, like sitting in a nice cafe and hearing a Doors album
on muzak, and some very important part of what made you who you are now has become
unreflected to you, where you don’t even listen. In fact, listening is maybe where I want to stop,
since I have talked so much, I would like stop maybe on the topic of listening. I have got a long
time to talk about listening… paradox.
But in a culture so overloaded, where we already suspect – if we don’t know – that it’s goal is
psychoanalysis in reverse. To make the parts of us that think into ones that don’t. To just react,
follow, or replicate. One thing that we can do, is tune out. So, many of us do that in one form or
another. We take the culture and simply try to tune out as much of it as we can. But… there is a
flaw in the strategy. And that’s that no culture ever was so pervasive. Even this word may be
bothering you. There was a time when culture meant going to the things created by us folks, as
opposed to nature. Where is nature now? There isn’t one. Everything has been inculturated. The
most beautiful natural scenes there are, are the filmed ones that are created
through fractogeometry at IBM.
And it’s… I heard a great remark that the Swiss cuisine at Busch Gardens is better than the food
in Switzerland… and more Swiss! You know, so, why bother to go? No reason! The food’s better,
there’s a Swiss person, there’s some yodelling – I’ve been there! – the rest of it’s just clocks. Well,
there’s a clock, you know. So this is a culture that… in a way, my critical remarks are beginning
to break down, have you noticed that? Because now it looks as though that we are heading
toward a society where you can plug yourself into it and it will meet your needs. Its… you can
press in your needs into the machine, and it will meet them. Big screen TV, CD’s all around, every
human need, maybe including the earlier one I discussed: the need [for] this radical freedom. I
said I wanted to go out on a date with Kathleen Turner, well who knows… three dimensional
replicant… punch it in, here she comes… hello. Since it’s a replicable image, you know… virtual
reality suit, maybe they’ll be able to sell me that, and every other need for all of you, every one.
But in the matrix of needs, in such a possible future system, as if it weren’t already kind of like
that. Within such a possible future system, the only command or need that the machine would
not respond to would be the one command that I have a feeling some of us would most want to
type into the machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that would be my
problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs except my need to see it destroyed. It
would take every other command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just shut
it down. Television is something like that now. It will meet so many psychic needs and fulfil so
many compensations… compensatory things for you.
We all know how it feels after a day at work to turn on our familiar show. I am not making fun of
it. It feels the same for me. Oh, Cheers again, I’ve seen this one! Phew… and you’re out of it for a
while. It’s just this [makes zoned out gesture]. But the one command you can’t order from the
television – or the show you can’t get – is the one that blows all the TVs in the world up. It won’t
do that. The demand even to turn it off is ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous thing. They go “Oh, you can
just turn it off”, yeah, on pain of falling out of anything that even resembles the resemblance of
reality. I didn’t say resembles reality, but resembles its resemblance. You don’t watch TV for two
weeks in this country and you walk around going “What happened???”. Well, you know damn well,
the same old stuff! But you still feel disconnected.
You know, it’s been bad here in Georgetown, you don’t have cable here. I’m going “NO CABLE???
You know, how backward are these people! Do you guys cook, you know, over open fires? I
mean, you got no cable? This close to the Whitehouse and no cable?”. So I had to walk up to a
bartender and I said how was the war going and he goes “Still winning”. Well I knew that! [crowd
laughter]. I knew it without watching it. A priori, we are always going to be still winning. That’s
an a priori truth about the war. I can guarantee you that. Every day the news will be the same:
“We are winning”. How about that? See, I can predict things based on my theory. We are going to
win. See, it’s a good prediction. We’ll win.
In any case, this may sound too cynical. I have tried to… well, of course it sounds too cynical, but
it’s sort of hard… to feel bad about that, about ending up in a kind of cynical spot. Because the
handlers and the various… You know, the handlers of the systems of mass culture could not
possibly be more cynical than they are; both about public taste, about how they… about their
own complicity with power. I’d love to see a news report that says: “Oh by the way, we are
speaking for the people who run your life, don’t worry about it”… “This news report is not true”…
Then we go: “Oh good, I am going to watch the not true news report…” [crowd laughter]. So, I
mean, don’t kill the messenger, you get it? I didn’t build that system. I am just trying to describe
it to you. The description of it sounds cynical, [but] on the other side of it there is a possible kind
of freedom… on the other side of it. I don’t know how to describe it, or how to even evoke it.
But it’s clear that where we can make systems of this complexity; cultural systems, economic
systems, machines and so on – of this complexity – surely we can make the world that could first
meet those needs that I described that everyone should have, and then perhaps meet needs that
people have only dreamed of, like the need for some autonomy and freedom. The need for that
little space up there, the “I” part, to expand a little bit, just a little. With the full knowledge that
you are going to still be a fallible, finite human. It’s still… a reasonable thing, to want some parts
of your life to be clear and reflected. That’s still reasonable to want. Even in the face of knowing
that the full achievement of that is fairly unlikely.
For Freud, civilisation was a drama between two principles: eros and thanatos, or to use Woody
Allen’s more normal words: love and death. And in this book, this last book I am discussing,
Freud paints a beautiful and quick panorama of civilisation as being a struggle between these
two – what he calls – eternal principles. Well, on the account I have been giving, the mechanisms
of one side have clearly gained the upper hand. Just clearly. It’s not… on that I really don’t think
it’s that debatable. But one can expect, as Freud admitted – in an hour in a history… in a time in
the history of the world as dark as this one – Freud admitted that it could be expected perhaps
that the other adversary, eternal eros might come in and strike a blow for the other side, that the
mechanisms of death and forgetfulness, which are very closely aligned… final death [make dying
gesture], death and forgetfulness, very close. That it might be expected that eros would have a…
make a comeback. Possibly.
That’s not much of a “keep hope alive” message in a culture… like this one. Especially as it
threatens to become global. Under conditions where many of the people in other parts of the
world that receive our culture will do so with extreme naivete. In Eastern Europe they’ll believe
we have got a democracy. They will love to have a VCR, and with each step forward they will
become more entrapped in the same totalitarian system that is much more subtle than the crude
and simple one that many of them have overthrown. What a joy to overthrow a crude and simple
totalitarian system. I mean all of us enjoyed that, right? Dancing on the wall was fun, because
that system was so crude, and not postmodern enough. They didn’t understand that there are
walls that you can build that cannot be seen between people.
Those are harder walls to overthrow, the walls they build between different races and classes and
sexes in our society. Those walls are much more difficult to overthrow than crude and stupid
walls like The Great Wall of China, which doesn’t wall anybody out, it just walls you in. But the
stupid forms of totalitarianism build these walls in a way that people can storm them. The global
system that I am talking about, not is already here, perhaps, but is on its way. Perhaps. About the
present and future you can just guess. I mean, you know, that’s what scientists do too, make
their best guess. You can just guess. But about this system, the walls will be much harder to
storm, because they won’t be the kind that will be available for storming. Hard to storm the walls
on TV, in fact you’ll already – like in Total Recall – have the feeling you have already stormed
them. You’ve already… I mean, you know, the guy in Total Recall, well, he has already won the
revolution, it’s cool. He did it in ten minutes sitting in a chair injected with the same emotions.
Those kind of walls and that kind of totalitarianism I suspect many people in the world don’t
suspect is the dark side of the American dream. I hope you… I hope there will be forms of
resistance, but the basis for that hope today is slim. I’d be less than honest if I said it was more
than slim. I expect, and with Freud hope that the final word hasn’t been said. I don’t think that in
a way it is a part of this system that final words are sayable. Even in this system. And I will have
to say this about it. That it has to reinject – and I haven’t got a good argument for this in the
time remaining – it does have to reinject resistance into it in some form or another. It’s important
that it at least put up a simulation of opposition. That’s why the most powerful anti war
movement America could have now, would be for the last few of us that are against the war to
just disappear completely so it looks like those polls are 100%, and many of my friends have
started throwing off the poll numbers and joining the pro demonstrators, because the worst
statement we could make about our democracy is to be unanimously for something, which will
make it self evident that it’s no democracy. So the most radical…
See, in our culture, our struggles will have to become more sophisticated. Instead of fighting
Bush, maybe the best way to fight him is to agree with him and say: “Hell yes, bomb them all”,
and get right with them. Talk all of your wildest friends into it, say yeah… because once 100%,
that’s saturation. No opposition? Bush will go “What will we do for a TV spot?”. They’ll have to
start hiring the CIA to go out and demonstrate. They would, well it seems they would. There’s no
opposition. That’s what we use to say we are a democracy, the opposition. So there will be all
kinds of new strategies, and I have not yet given up on that last remaining spots of clarity that
are around in the world. To quote George Bush: “Those thousand points of light”. Well it might
turn out that they might not be what he suspects.
I am just not willing quite yet – and I don’t know, I guess your questions will be “why not?” – to
write radical democracy‘s final obituary. And yet… and this is the point where I have to say I
don’t have an argument. It’s taken me a long time. I just don’t have an argument about why not
to write its final obituary. I have seen too much of this last… especially the last fifteen years or so
– of Reagan and Bush – not to feel like writing that last obituary for radical democracy, or even
for these private moments that I have tried to steal from this text where we have that clear
thought in our own mind and we are sure it’s not the unreflected part being produced by our
culture.
I am not quite, even under these conditions, ready to write the final obituary. I don’t have any
argument, but I at least… I have this much going for it. It’s… now, I am really going to go back to
an archaic text called the New Testament. Going to have a good revolutionary argument to hook
you with at the end. I mean in a way, that’s why I said “preaching”, I feel like Paul before the
Corinthians, and they were all real cynical, and I can see that I’m pretty cynical, you’re pretty
cynical, St Paul was pretty cynical. All the Corinthians were going “This resurrection in the body
stuff…”, kind of like how some of you may go “This radical democracy stuff?”… “What do you
mean resurrection in the body?”… “What do you mean freedom, radical democracy,
enlightenment? What the hell are you talking about?”.
Well if you read the… read Corinthians, it’s very strange. The people at Corinth are really
questioning Paul… very tough, you know “Resurrection in what body? When I was 16? 15? 14?
Where will I be”, and stuff. Well please… this is my last reading assignment, and it’s a widely
known text… its The Bible. Look at Paul’s answer in Corinthians. It’s a masterpiece of sophistry,
rhetoric, and bitter invective. No arguments, because how could you have an argument for such a
utopian thing, you couldn’t. But Paul does have one consideration that is very persuasive to the
Corinthians: that if this hope goes, everything goes with it. It’s a desperate form of argument,
but these are desperate times. If the hope goes to reconstruct our lives in that way, everything
else will go with it. Everything. And not in that neat, fun way like the apocalypse, where you all
get to Rod Serling yourselves out together and me too, but everything human will go too. So, if
there is no other reason to hope that things will change, then hope was after all, all we were
given in the first place, for those who were hopeless. Hope was given for the sake of the
hopeless, not for people who are comfortable.
Philosophy, as I said, does not provide comfort for people who are comfortable, it shouldn’t. It
doesn’t even provide comfort for the afflicted as you may have found out if you are afflicted. It is
– as I tried to warn you when I started – disconsolate in principle. Hegel says it in a scarier way.
He says “Dialectics (or philosophy) does not run from death and devastation, but it tarries with it
a while and looks it in the face”. So that’s all I have tried to do with our culture in this last couple
of hours, which may have seemed strange to some of you, you may think “Oh, things aren’t that
bad because after all the TVs are still running, the people are for it, and everybody is happy, and
I’ll go back to my normal life”. Unfortunately, giving talks like this is a part of my normal life,
eww. But don’t forget as you watch the TV that the fires of Belsen burn in the TV tubes every
night. Don’t forget that the structural principles of our society are as barbaric in their structure
as they ever were, perhaps more so… perhaps more so. We have to remember we are talking at a
historical moment when most folks want to nuke somebody again and why not!

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